A funny thing happened last week while I was across the pond at : Acxiom opened the kimono and showed us its data bits. On September 4, the biggest name in data aggregation that most people have never heard of, let alone are able to pronounce, unveiled Regular readers will remember that back in May I , chief privacy officer for Acxiom, who denied that her employer was actively working on a data portal for consumers. Well, so much for that. Apologies to my readers and to Emily Steel for suggesting otherwise. Shame on Acxiom for not being honest with me. The portal itself is not a huge leap forward in transparency, but it’s a step in the right direction.
A recent federal court ruling is a warning to companies that workers' non-public Facebook postings are private and uninvited employers have no right to read them. The ruling, handed down in August, stemmed from a lawsuit filed by a paramedic against Monmouth-Ocean Hospital Service Corp. (MONOC) in New Jersey. Deborah Ehling was disciplined after posting on her Facebook wall a comment criticizing Washington, D.C., paramedics' handling of a . The U.S. District Court decision is significant because it is one of very few rulings addressing whether meant only for users' "friends" are protected under the federal Stored Communications Act. Passed in 1986, the act extends protection to electronic communications that are configured to be private. "The message that we're getting here is that the courts will take very seriously the privacy interests of someone who is using social media and designates it as private communications," Robert Quackenboss, a partner in the labor employment group of the law firm Hunton & Williams, said last week.
The "Personal Computer Era" has evolved into the "Personal Cloud Era" with the surprising new entrant, the tablet, says Michel Emelianoff, executive vice president of Alcatel-Lucent and president of Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise. For the last 30 years or so, we have been living in what some refer to as the "Personal Computer Era." During this period, the Personal Computer (PC) became the center of everything and it became more important every day. In many cases, it has also become the sole device for access to corporate information. But for a couple of years, a surprising new entrant has created something quite different from what we knew in the past—the tablet, and its arrival in the enterprise space is a symptom of a global transformation.
Businesses are still ignoring the threat posed by out-of-date versions of Java, with barely one in five running the latest version during August, security firm Websense . After running traffic through the firm's ThreatSeeker Intelligence Cloud, an incredible 40 percent of Java requests were found to be from Java 6 Standard Edition (SE), succeeded by Java 7 SE more than two years ago. Java 6 support ended in April 2013. Some might have continued to run this for compatibility reasons for a time, but ignoring the issue would now be leaving them open to The general tendency not to update meant that 81 percent of browsers were now vulnerable to two recent vulnerabilities in particular, CVE-2013-2473 and CVE-2013-2463 from June this year, for which there were working exploits, Websense said.
HP TippingPoint's bug bounty program today said it will again sponsor a mobile-only hacking contest this fall, when it will put up $300,000 in prize money for researchers who demonstrate successful attacks against mobile services and browsers.
The security of Windows 8 picture passwords might not be as weak as some recent headlines indicate, and there are ways to maximize how hard they are to crack, researchers say. . And by following itself, picture passwords can be made significantly more secure. The issue came up when researchers at the Usenix Security Symposium were easily cracked.
A U.S appellate court's decision last week to permit a wiretapping case against Google to proceed, is based on flawed reasoning, a leading technology think-tank says. On September 10, the U.S. Appeals Court for the Ninth Circuit to dismiss claims that it had violated the federal Wiretap Act when it collected data from unencrypted Wi-Fi networks when capturing Street View photographs. In 2010, Google admitted that its Street View cars had in homes and businesses when shooting photographs. The company publicly apologized for what it claimed was an honest mistake and offered to destroy or make inaccessible the nearly 660GB of data it had collected from the networks. Several individuals claiming the company had violated the Wiretap Act, which prohibits the intentional interception of electronic data. In the lawsuit, the plaintiffs noted that Google's Street View cars had recorded a considerable amount of data from open Wi-Fi networks including SSIDs, MAC addresses, and even "payload" data such as personal emails, passwords, videos, and documents.
Cyber attacks, such as the computer security incident response team director Michael Smith. While Smith admits that cyber attacks are often designed to punish a particular organization that is he adds that the aim is to also generate press for their cause. "What we have seen with hactivists is that attacking a website tends to be more about generating media coverage about their cause than it is about which site they targeted or what the impact was," he said. In the case of the New York Times, are not going away, either.
Philadelphia Eagles fans attending Sunday's home opener at Lincoln Financial Field will be able to access a new free Wi-Fi network to watch game video, visit social networks, or even order food. The installation of the Wi-Fi network, which cost "several million" dollars, is part of a two-year, $130 million renovation of the 69,000-seat venue, according to Eagles President Don Smolenski, who noted that the wireless network was a big hit with concertgoers over the summer. "At the Taylor Swift concert in July, I was watching all these teenage girls taking pictures of themselves with their cellphones, and even Taylor Swift was tweeting during a rain delay," Smolenski said, adding that the singer's tweets were carried to the blogosphere via the free Wi-Fi network. "It's going to be no different at the Eagles' games, with people watching videos and taking photos" and using the Wi-Fi network for in-seat food ordering, he said.
For Web surfers tired of having their and who want to make anonymous searches, the new Epic Privacy Browser from Hidden Reflex may be just the thing with the added bonus of some faster download speeds. The browser, free to proxies all search requests so they can't be traced back to actual source IP addresses, and it has a one-click proxy feature that can invoke the same proxy for any other type of browser activity, according to Alok Bhardwaj, founder and CEO of Hidden Reflex. The browser won't accept third-party cookies and blocks trackers as well as ads, which often include trackers. The average Web page contains six trackers, he says, with some having up to 40. A side benefit of blocking them is faster download speeds from some sites because without ads and trackers less information is downloaded to build pages, Bhardwaj says. Epic blocks referrer data sent to search engines to prevent those engines from gathering and selling the data to advertisers.
Dell has rolled out new desktop and mobile workstations to give its Precision line a complete overhaul. Across the line you'll find new chips, faster RAM and a laptop screen that puts the MacBook Pro's Retina Display to shame. The 15.6-inch M4800 and 17.3-inch M6800 replace the M4700 and M6700 respectively. Both gain fourth-generation Intel Core i5 and i7 processors—including if you have deep pockets—and support up to 16GB of 1866MHz RAM. You've got a choice of AMD FirePro or NVidia Quadro graphics chips, with the M6800 offering the Quadro 5100M chip with 8GB of graphics RAM. The laptops use either AMD's Enduro or Nvidia's Optimus technology—depending on which manufacturer's chip is inside it—to tune-down the graphics chip to save power when high-performance isn't needed (such as when you're doing your email), and extend the battery life. Dell describes the M4800 and M6800 as having "all-day battery life," based on its tests using the MobileMark 2007 benchmark.
A startup last week unveiled technology it claims can can simultaneously charge multiple different devices in a house, even through walls and around corners, by using the same radio spectrum as other wireless standards, such as Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. "You don't have to put that device in every room. You just put it into one room in your house and it will power all your devices," said Hatem Zeine, founder of Ossia, developer of the technology. "It's like your Wi-Fi signal. If you can get a Wi-Fi signal, you'll be able to get power." After six years of development, unwrapped the new Cota wireless charging technology that it says will be available to consumers and enterprises by 2015. Zeine demonstrated the technology with a prototype at the technology conference in San Francisco last week.
When NSA chief Gen. Keith Alexander addressed the Black Hat conference earlier this year, he painted a rosy picture of how well the agency controls access to its phone record database, but he never brought up cases when those controls broke down, unauthorized access was made, and data was shared among analysts who shouldn't have seen it. Documents just released by the government say that far from being a well-oiled machine to the security conference last month, the so-called business-record metadata gathering program was repeatedly misused, data about activity on certain phone lines was accessed without appropriate authorization and that no single person at the NSA understood the technicalities of the system architecture. Not only that, the the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court about its misuse of the data, according to FISC documents from 2009. At Black Hat, Alexander described the measures taken to ensure that call-detail records gathered by the NSA and stockpiled in a database for five years at a time as well guarded and queried only if there is "reasonable actionable suspicion" that a specific phone number was linked to foreign terrorists.
The price of DRAM memory has been steadily climbing since heavily damaged parts of a major fabrication facility in Wuxi, China. The fire that damaged SK Hynix Semiconductor's FAB plant . The Wuxi facility accounts for 10 percent of the world's DRAM production and produces almost half of the 260,000 memory wafers Hynix makes every month, according to TrendForce. The price of 2Gbit DRAM chips, commonly used in desktop and laptop memory modules, has passed the $2 mark, representing a 27.6 percent increase since the fire, said Avril Wu, an analyst at DRAMeXchange. "Based on our current evaluation, this fire is going to impact supply sharply. Therefore, the price of both spot price and contract price is likely to keep going up," Wu said.
The Obad.a Android Trojan identified in June turns out to have the innovative and predatory capability to piggyback on malware botnets.
Tablet shipments will surpass total PC shipments in the fourth quarter of 2013, forecasts IDC. Tablets and smartphones 16.5 percent and 70.5 percent respectively to the worldwide smart connected device market by 2017, according to IDC Worldwide Quarterly Smart Connected Device Tracker. The are expected to drop to 13 percent by 2017. This year, the global smart connected device, which includes PCs, tablets, and smartphones, is set to be $622.4 billion and out of this $423.1 billion will come from the smartphone and tablet segments collectively.
Recently my wife, Mrs. Hassle-Free PC, turned to me and said, "I want to watch 'The Jazz Singer.'" Because I've been married long enough to know better, I didn't say, "Why on earth do you want to watch that?" I merely nodded and replied, "You got it, babe." (Clearly Mrs. Hassle-Free PC is a very lucky woman.) Ah, but it's not like we can just run up to the local video store and rent it. Our neighborhood Blockbuster closed its doors a couple years ago, meaning we had little choice but to investigate our online options. Needless to say, there are many: Amazon, Crackle, Hulu, iTunes, Netflix, Sony's Entertainment Network, Vudu, Xbox, Xfinity on Demand, and so on.
The return of Mindy Kaling's hilarious sitcom is streaming now, plus a crop of new pilots with familiar premises.
Jason Snell takes a shadowy flight into the world of people... who do not exist.
The harrowing tale of how Nokia once considered ditching Microsoft for Google.
Even before grabbed the spotlight Thursday, the market for tech IPOs had been heating up thanks to a general rise in stocks. There were 12 tech IPOs in the U.S. in the second quarter, twice as many as in the first quarter, according to the latest PwC Global Technology IPO Review, released Thursday. Second quarter IPOs were also up 50 percent year over year, in terms of the number of deals, PwC said. “The increasing risk appetite of investors, followed by a rising equity market, led to a surge in IPO activity in [the second quarter of 2013],” according to the report. With the European economy stalling and an absence of IPOs in China, the U.S. led the world in tech IPOs in the second quarter, with two-thirds of the global total.
The U.S. Federal Communications Commission will sell 10 megahertz of spectrum in the 1900MHz band for commercial mobile services in an auction beginning Jan. 14, the agency announced Friday. of $1.56 billion, with some of the money funding the First Responder Network Authority (FirstNet), a government board building a nationwide broadband network for public safety agencies. The auction will help mobile providers address a predicted spectrum shortage, said Mignon Clyburn, the FCC’s acting chairwoman. The auction “will help close the spectrum gap as well as contributing to the goal of making mobile broadband available to our nation’s first responders,” she said in a statement. Congress, in the Middle Class Tax Relief and Job Creation Act of 2012, required the FCC to license 65 megahertz of spectrum, including the 10 megahertz in the H block, by February 2015.
Who wins, loses, or draws in the aftermath of Twitter's IPO.
Companies of all sizes are picking up their adoption of SaaS (software as a service), with email, calendaring and human resources applications garnering the most interest, according to a new survey from Constellation Research. Email and calendaring is the most popular choice for SaaS among the survey respondents, with 37 percent saying such products are on their radar, wrote Constellation vice president and principal analyst Frank Scavo. “Most IT decision makers have had personal experience with personal webmail or Web calendaring applications, such as Google Calendar,” Scavo wrote. “It is not surprising, then, to see these personal productivity applications leading the list of SaaS investment plans.” Human resources applications is the next most popular SaaS category, with 32 percent saying they’ll invest in it. Such applications “often include access by widely dispersed employee populations, making them a good candidate for SaaS deployment,” Scavo wrote.
Getting Outlook.com to work with email client applications via IMAP is proving to be a challenge for some users of the Microsoft webmail service. in the blog post Microsoft published Thursday announcing the new IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol) support in Outlook.com. To their credit, Microsoft officials are clearly monitoring the feedback very closely, as evidenced by their frequent replies to the comments being posted. “We’ve seen a handful of reports of users running into the error 9 so we’re looking into this with high priority,” wrote Ben Poon, an Outlook.com program manager with Microsoft, referring to a server timeout error some users are experiencing.
Völgar the Viking is, in all ways, the perfect Sega Genesis game
More than a year after Microsoft introduced its revamped, modern-style webmail service, Outlook.com finally—finally!—supports IMAP. The IMAP protocol allows standalone email clients to access messages stored on a remote mail server, meaning any changes you make to your inbox appears on other devices, too; if you mark a message as read on your PC's email client, for example, it shows as read on your phone, too. That's pretty handy in a multi-device world, and IMAP is a veritable email staple of most client software. Outlook.com has relied on Microsoft's own Exchange ActiveSync technology to fill the real-time hole, but some email software (including many Mac programs) simply doesn't support EAS. Outlook.com users relying on EAS-less clients have had to fall back on the inferior POP protocol, which downloads messages to your local machine rather than managing them on Outlook.com's servers. That was lame—but that ended on Thursday, too. If you want to use IMAP with Outlook.com, here are the settings to use in your email client:
You've bumped your phone, you've bumped your had NFC all the way back in January.) While the mere concept brings to mind ridonkulous visions of people trying to slam their M70 PC against NFC-enabled printers, Asus says the desktop was designed primarily to play nice with Android phones. The company's packs some truly handy-dandy one tap features. With it, you can: The mobile-friendly tricks don't end there, though: Asus says the M70 PC will also wirelessly charge mobile devices via a Qi-compatible charger tray. The computer also ships with Asus' Ai Charger software, which helps your USB 3.0 ports deliver juice to iPads, iPhones, and iPods at . Configurations can include a full range of Intel Core processors and low-end Nvidia graphics cards, while an uninterruptible power supply protects against blackouts. Asus kept mum on the other technical details, including key points like pricing and a release date.
Microsoft's new attack ad lacks imagination and innovation. Sound familiar?
