Less than three weeks before a massive U.S. government health information database is scheduled to go live, some lawmakers have significant concerns about the ability of the system to protect personal health records and other private information. It’s unclear if security measures are in place at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ health exchange data hub, a huge IT system that will process uninsured U.S. residents’ applications for health insurance, said Representative Patrick Meehan, a Pennsylvania Republican. “I have grave concerns from a cybersecurity standpoint,” Meehan said on Wednesday during a hearing of the cybersecurity subcommittee of the U.S. House of Representatives Homeland Security Committee. The data hub, scheduled to go live Oct. 1, will process names, dates of birth, Social Security numbers, health conditions, and several other pieces of personal information, Meehan said.
Seagate that it has sold more than 1 million drives using a new recording technology that will offer consumers 5TB hard drives next year and possibly 20TB drives by 2020. The technology Seagate is touting— (SMR)—is needed more than ever. Just as NAND flash is running up against a miniaturization wall, where the circuitry has little room to continue to shrink in size, hard drives face a similar density dilemma. The data tracks on a 1TB hard-drive platter cannot afford to shrink much more, according to Seagate. The theoretical limit of magnetic , called the superparamagnetic limit—about 1Tbit per square inch of storage density—is fast approaching. Increasing the density beyond that will lead to data corruption issues. Currently, Seagate's drives store data at up to 625Gbits per square inch of storage areal density.
Valve announces the new Family Sharing system will enter beta testing next month.
Now that a slightly modified S500 luxury sedan has driven itself 62 miles from Mannheim to Pforzheim, in Germany, Mercedes joins a very small and exclusive club of companies testing self-driving cars.
Intel on Wednesday ended weeks of speculation by launching "Bay Trail," the next-generation Atom Z3000 chip that pushes tablets towards PC-esque levels of performance. . , before touching on a wave of next-gen, Haswell-powered Chromebooks slated to land in the coming months. Hermann Eul, vice president and general manager of the Mobile Communications Group, described how Intel is designing multiple components across the system. "[Mobility] connects us to our partners, to our friends, and to the cloud—even to our own bodies," Eul said.
South Korean organizations that conduct research on international affairs, national security and Korean unification are under siege from cyberspies whose attack may have its origins in North Korea. The attack campaign, which has been dubbed “Kimsuky,” involves the use of malware to steal sensitive information from these institutions and has been monitored for the past several months by researchers from antivirus vendor Kaspersky Lab. The full list of victims remains unknown, but Kaspersky’s technical analysis suggests that organizations targeted included: the Sejong Institute, a non-profit think tank that conducts research in the areas of national security, unification, regional issues and international political economy; the Korea Institute for Defense Analyses (KIDA), a research institution whose research focuses on military planning, security and strategy, human resource development, weapon systems, and more; the South Korean Ministry of Unification which works towards the reunification of Korea and promotes inter-Korean dialogue and the Hyundai Merchant Marine, a South Korean logistics company specialized in container shipping. .
Few tech buzzwords of late have been more prevalent than “big data,” and SAP is hoping to make sure the market knows it’s hip to the trend with a series of new announcements. Perhaps the most significant announcement, made at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco on Wednesday, concerns a pair of new agreements under which SAP will resell and support Apache Hadoop distributions from Intel and Hortonworks. While SAP had already begun building bridges between its own products and Hadoop, the open-source framework for large-scale data processing, the Intel and Hortonworks deals will allow it to offer customers a more well-rounded set of Hadoop tools. “We have signed a formal agreement driven by both companies at the executive level to make HANA plus Hadoop a winning combination for our customers,” said Irfan Khan, senior vice president and general manager, SAP Big Data, in an interview.
Apple's two new iPhones carry the DNA of the phones that came before them, but have evolved in interesting ways. Here are the important things you should know about Apple's two new iPhone lines.
Reports say that Roku set-top boxes will soon get DIAL support, eventually giving users a way to launch streaming videos on television from their phones or tablets.
Dell showed a new Windows 8.1 tablet Wednesday called Venue, which is a brand name for mobile devices the PC maker abandoned when it discontinued shipment of smartphones early last year. The Venue tablet has an 8-inch screen and runs on Intel’s Atom chip code-named Bay Trail. It was demonstrated as shown above on stage by Neil Hand, vice president at Dell, during a keynote at the Intel Developer Forum being held in San Francisco. The tablet will be marketed to both consumers and enterprises, and will have long-battery life and cellular data connectivity. More details about the new Venue tablet and other devices will be shared at an event in New York City on October 2, Hand said, hinting that more mobile devices from Dell could be on tap. The new tablet also marks Dell’s reentry into the consumer tablet market. The company today offers the XPS 10 with Windows RT and the Latitude 10 with Windows 8, both targeted at enterprises. Dell last year discontinued its Streak line of consumer tablets, but has reiterated its support for the consumer tablet market and Windows 8 OS.
Mountain View says it filters copyright-infringing content from its autocomplete function, but not all search filters are created equal.
Embracing the growing market for mobile applications, Embarcadero Technologies has updated its flagship RAD Studio so developers can use the IDE (integrated development environment) to write C++ or Delphi programs for both Android and iOS devices. Over 85 percent of Windows desktop developers have received requests to develop mobile applications, Embarcadero found in a commissioned survey of 1,300 programmers. With the addition to these mobile platforms, the IDE provides a way to write native, CPU executable code for Android, iOS, Windows and Apple OS X from a single console, according to Embarcadero. Because RAD Studio encompasses these widely used platforms, a developer can maintain a single code base for a program that needs to be available on two or more of these platforms. It also could allow enterprises to create apps for their workers’ favorite personal devices—the trend known as BYOD (bring your own device).
Space Gray isn't just for iPhones—iPods get it too.
As Apple and Wal-Mart enter the trade-in market, NextWorth ups its game, anticipating swarms of older phones being traded by users to fund new iPhones.
The proposed law includes both “carrot-and-stick” elements to encourage mobile phone operators to remove roaming charges for customers who use mobile phones while traveling in the E.U.
Home theater PCs usually aren't gaming-worthy unless they're as large as proper game consoles, but not Gigabyte's latest Brix, which packs Intel's high-end Iris Pro integrated graphics. , it's even smaller than an Xbox 360 controller. Although Gigabyte hasn't officially announced the Iris Pro-packing Brix, the company was showing off its product at the Intel Developer Forum this week. on Intel's fourth-generation Core processors (codenamed Haswell). With Iris, Intel is hoping that its integrated graphics can finally compete on some level with dedicated graphics cards. The company has claimed in the past that Iris Pro performance is on par with Nvidia's GeForce GT 650M, a chip found in some high-end notebooks. of Iris Pro graphics have found success with more modern games, at least at lower resolutions. An Intel representative claimed that the Brix II could even run Crysis 3 to some extent.
The European Union’s proposed net neutrality law allows different price plans for different Internet speeds to the detriment of net neutrality, digital activists said Wednesday. Without the proposed law, 96 percent of Europeans would be without any legal framework at all for net neutrality, said Digital Agenda Commissioner Neelie Kroes, who drew up the draft law presented Wednesday. Only the Netherlands and Slovenia have net neutrality laws. The text explicitly bans ISPs from blocking and throttling content and gives consumers the freedom to terminate contracts with ISPs that don’t deliver the speeds subscribers pay for, Kroes said. Article 23 of the proposed law bans ISPs from “blocking, slowing down, degrading or discriminating against specific content, applications or services.” Except in cases where it is necessary to apply reasonable traffic management measures in order to “implement a court order, prevent serious crimes, preserve the integrity and security of the network or minimize the effects of temporary or exceptional network congestion.” However, net neutrality advocates said that Article 23 leaves the door open for a two-tiered Internet by allowing ISPs to offer speeds at different rates through “specialized services with a defined quality of service or dedicated capacity.”
The photos you take on your smartphone aren't stuck there. Here's how to get them off quickly and easily.
High-performance tablets are about to become very, very cheap, if Intel has any say in the matter. The company took the wraps off its newest system-on-chip (SoC) at the annual Intel Developers Forum (IDF) Tuesday. Code-named Bay Trail, the new processor family will power new Windows and Android on tablets priced as low as $199. In fact, Intel Mobile and Communications Group General Manager Chris Walker said at an embargoed briefing on Monday that Bay Trail–powered tablets will have prices as low as $199 by the end of 2013, and original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) will have “the flexibility to go lower.” Intel gave us about 2 hours of hands-on time with two reference-design tablets outfitted with 2.4GHz, quad-core Atom Z3770 processors and 2GB of DDR3L/1067 memory (one running Windows 8.1 and the other Android 4.2.2). The devices had 8-inch screens with a native resolution of 2560 by 1440 pixels. While Intel does not intend to bring these tablets to the consumer retail market, Walker said that they are representative of what Intel’s OEM partners will deliver later this year. on the Windows 8.1 version and experience relatively fluid gameplay on an 8-inch tablet.
Sometime in the future, iPhones might contain as much memory as a Mac or Windows PC. Apple’s iPad could become the notebook of the future, while versions of the Mac may run iOS as well. to power the new iPhone 5s. Apple itself designed the A7 chip within the new iPhone, although the chip’s core was licensed from ARM, whose microprocessor designs power the vast majority of all smartphones today. As it stands now, there’s arguably little reason for Apple to do so. approaches that, with 3GB of memory. (Apple hasnt said how much memory the iPhone 5s has.)
On Wednesday, Intel will show off a notebook with an integrated camera capable of interpreting gestures and understanding voice commands at its Intel Developer Forum, executives said. , and which began shipping last week at the IFA conference in Berlin, Navin Shenoy, vice president of the PC Client Group and general manager of the Mobile Client Platform Division, said in an interview. Retailers including Best Buy have begun selling the camera, along with OEMs like Dell and Lenovo, which will bundle it with dedicated apps, he said. , dedicated to spending $100 million to the technology over the next two or three years, and licensed technology SoftKinetic’s iisu middleware as an additional driver. The Creative Senz3D camera could follow the user’s gaze, interpret gestures, and even recognize the user, Intel executives said at the time. The integrated camera within the notebook Intel will present is somewhat simpler, recognizing gestures and speech. Until this year, speech recognition remained a relatively hidden part of the Windows operating system, and Microsoft's embrace of touch input was seen as the the first major addition to the Windows UI in some time.
to more of the company's laptop lineup. Most intriguing are the updated ThinkPad T440p and ThinkPad T540p "premium business notebooks." The notebooks will include processor options all the way up to a full quad-core Core i7 while still offering up to 13.7 and 12.6 hours of battery life respectively with the help of an extended battery pack (though the endurance no doubt drops as you uptick the CPU options). Some models will contain discrete Nvidia GT730M graphics, and options range up to 16GB of RAM, 4G LTE connectivity, and a 1TB hard drive. (Solid-state drives are also available.) As you would expect in a business laptop, there's an SD card reader and USB 3.0 ports abound. If measly GT730M graphics just don't cut it for you, there's the ThinkPad W540 mobile workstation, which crams in professional-grade Nvidia Quadro graphics and a 15.5-inch IPS display with a whopping 2880-by-1620 resolution. The firepower doesn't stop there: Options go all the way up to 32GB of RAM and 2TB of storage (complete with RAID array options). Yes, 4G LTE is available, and this graphics-focused workhorse even ships with a Thunderbolt port.
From the moment you launch FreeUndelete, you see that this utility is all business (and in fact, it's not free for businesses—just for individuals). FreeUndelete 2.1.36867.1 features a spartan interface, with no cutesy graphics and little in the way of color. And you won't find much in the way of instruction: If you want to use FreeUndelete, you're going to have to figure out how to do so on your own.
Out of all the computing hassles you can face, nothing quite compares to dropping your laptop on a hard floor. Because, typically, that's the end of your laptop. Or maybe not. What happened was this: I had my backpack on my kitchen table (it's a "gathering table," and therefore higher than most). I went to slip my laptop into the zippered side pocket as I've done a hundred times, but just at that moment, something distracted me. . Not realizing I'd missed the pocket, I'd released my grip on the machine, and it went tumbling to the floor. Landed right on its corner, too.
The purchase will be used for AT&T's 4G LTE deployment across 18 states.
Adobe released security updates for Flash Player, Adobe Reader and Shockwave Player on Tuesday to address critical vulnerabilities that could allow attackers to take control of systems running vulnerable versions of those programs. The Flash Player updates that can lead to arbitrary code execution. The updates are version numbers 11.8.800.168 for Windows and Mac OS X; 11.2.202.310 for Linux; 11.1.115.81 for Android 4.x; and 11.1.111.73 for Android 3.x and 2.x. Users of Google Chrome and Internet Explorer 10 on Windows 8 will automatically receive updates for the Flash Player plug-in bundled with those browsers through their respective update mechanisms. The same Flash Player vulnerabilities were patched in Adobe AIR, a runtime for rich Internet applications that also bundles Flash Player. Adobe released version 3.8.0.1430 of AIR and AIR SDK (software development kit) for Windows, Mac OS X and Android.
It's the biggest change to Apple's mobile OS since the introduction of the iPhone. Naturally, we all have lots of questions about iOS 7. Here are the answers we have now that Apple's announced a release date.
While Apple was announcing its iPhones, Motorola was busy showing off its American Moto X manufacturing facilities
The Firefox OS, a new contender in mobile operating systems, will likely see HTML5-related attacks and assaults on a crucial operating system process, according to security vendor Trend Micro. Some mobile phone operators are , which comes from Mozilla, the nonprofit organization behind the Firefox desktop browser. Mozilla’s Firefox OS seeks to challenge the dominance of Android and iOS, Google and Apple’s operating systems. Firefox OS is geared toward high-performance, low-cost phones running applications using the HTML5 web programming language. Firefox OS borrows much from the Firefox mobile browser and Gecko application framework, which is used to render Web pages and display applications. The platform underpinning Firefox OS, called Boot to Gecko (B2G), borrows 95 percent of its code from the mobile browser and Gecko, according to Mozilla.
The Next Web reports Google has quietly added back the RSS Feed option to Google Alerts. I’ve confirmed the RSS Feed option has indeed returned at google.com/alerts. In early July, Google quietly dropped RSS delivery as an option for Google Alerts. I lost tons of the alerts I’ve set up,...
John Lincoln from Ignite Visibility spotted a Google Hangout where Google’s John Mueller confirmed that Google will use URLs or domain names within content that are unlinked, i.e. without an a href attribute, to discover and index new pages of content. John went on to add that typically no...
Today Bing Ads launched the updates the company announced in June to make the platform more compatible with the changes Google ushered in with enhanced campaigns. The updates were implemented to support uploading of now-enhanced AdWords campaigns into the Bing Ads platform. Device preferences on...
Yelp quietly made a pretty big expansion of its search capabilities on iOS within the past week. The company’s latest iOS app update included a new photo viewer, increased visibility of bookmarked businesses, improvements to review highlights … and about 15 new search filters that...
Google’s head of search spam, Matt Cutts posted a new video today talking about the Panda update. The question he tried to answer was, “what should a site owner do if they think they might be affected by Panda?” Matt’s short answer to the question is to make sure to write...
It’s pretty easy to sit back and slam Google for how you think it should make decisions when it comes to search listings. It’s much harder to actually make those decisions, when you have a deeper understanding of all the implications involved. To experience this better, here’s a...
It’s Google’s latest “moon shot.” Google Glass. A wearable computer that offers hands-free access to both the consumption and creation of online content. Some say Glass changes everything, while others remain skeptical about Glass’ place in the digital future. This...
Not every company sees the value of SEM in the B2B space. Companies that only do two or three deals per year based solely on lead nurturing will have no need to rank for keywords or for building site traffic. Selling any website services outside of design to these high-ticket companies may seem...
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the Web. From Search Engine Land: Google’s Cutts: Auto-Generated Content & Search Results In Our Index Violate Our Guidelines In a recent video from Matt Cutts, Google’s head of...