Ein Mobiltelefon mit maximal einer Stunde Akkulaufzeit oder eine Digitalkamera, die nur 32 Fotos speichern kann: Diese Erfindungen ebneten den Weg für die moderne Technologie.
Vom Augenkrebs zur Kacheloptik: Am 10. November 1983 hat Microsoft die Entwicklung von Windows angekündigt. Ein Blick zurück auf 30 Jahre PC-Geschichte.
Mit Schnappschüssen von Marihuana, Medikamenten und Partydrogen haben Nutzer auf Instagram ihre Ware angeboten. Der Fotodienst will dem illegalen Treiben nun einen Riegel schieben.
Seit Wochen kursierten wilde Spekulationen zu einem Google-Containerschiff in der Bucht von San Francisco. Jetzt hat der Web-Gigant das Rätsel aufgelöst.
Informationen aus Wlan-Netzen wurde zeitweise von Google Street View mitgeschnitten. Nun hat ein brasilianisches Gericht angeordnet, dass der Konzern darüber aufklären muss.
Blockbuster, einst die grösste Videothekenkette der Welt, schliesst Anfang 2014 die letzten Filialen. Streaming-Angebote im Internet haben dem US-Konzern den Garaus gemacht.
Tiefe Einblicke ins Innenleben der neuen Konsolengeneration: In einem fast schon rituellen Video hat Sony in Japan die PS4 Stück für Stück auseinandergenommen.
20-Zoll-Bildschirm, 2,35 Kilogramm schwer, eine Auflösung von 3840x2560 Pixeln - das Panasonic Toughpad 4K macht seinem Namen alle Ehre. Nächstes Jahr soll Verkaufsstart sein.
Mit «Warface» setzt Highend-Entwickler Crytek neu auch auf Free-to-Play. Crytek-Geschäftsführer Faruk Yerli verrät, wie Free-to-Play die Zukunft des Gamens definiert.
Altmodisches Bezahlmodell, zu einfaches Hochleveln oder schlicht zu alt: Die aktiven Nutzer des früher so beliebten Computerspiels WoW werden stets weniger.
Das seit Anfang Monat offiziell in der Schweiz erhältliche iPad Air kostet in der Herstellung weniger als seine Vorgänger. Grund dafür sind bessere Lieferkonditionen.
Twitter hat an der Wall Street wie eine Bombe eingeschlagen. Auch die Zahl der Tweets steigt täglich. Doch es gibt Hinweise auf einen «Burnout» - bei prominenten Nutzern.
Beim österreichischen Wettanbieter Interwetten kann Geld auf Fussballspiele gesetzt werden, die vom Computer simuliert werden. Suchtexperten sehen das als Gefahr.
Erstmals in der Geschichte ändert der Social-Media-Riese seinen Like-Button. Das neue Design, das auf Webseiten eingebunden wird, ist blockiger und kommt (fast) ohne Daumen aus.
Facebook and Microsoft are winning plaudits from security researchers for launching an initiative to offer bounties to bug hunters who discover and report vulnerabilities in widely used products. Unlike other bug bounty programs, the by the duo is not vendor-specific. Rather it will reward bug hunters for vulnerabilities they discover in a range of technologies that includes Python, Perl, PHP, Ruby on Rails, and Django, Apache and Nginx Web. Also covered are technologies such as the application sandbox mechanisms in Internet Explorer 10, Google Chrome, and Adobe Reader. A website set up under the program allows bug hunters to report vulnerabilities and connect them with response teams capable of addressing the bugs. The site spells out the vulnerability disclosure guidelines, specific disclosure timelines and processes that security researchers must follow to qualify for a reward. The Internet Bug Bounty program aims to reward security research in areas that will ultimately make the Web more secure overall, according to Facebook and Microsoft.
Spear phishing is one of the most effective ways to break into a corporate network, and recent studies show that employees can be easily tricked on social media to provide the information needed to launch attacks. A phishing attack is only as good as the information hackers are able to gather on the intended victim, who is less likely to click on a malicious link or attachment in an email that does appear to come from As a result, criminals often research their targets on the Web. For example, Websense Security Labs recently found a fake LinkedIn profile gathering information that could be used in future attacks. The profile summary pretends to be that of "Jessica Reinsch," a made-up employee of a real dating Web site that connects young women with older, wealthy men. The site is located in Switzerland.
Most Internet users would feel more confident that their privacy is protected online if advertisers and Web companies adhered to certain guidelines that limited the amount of data they can collect and offer consumers the ability to opt out of tracking, according to a new survey from the Digital Advertising Alliance, a coalition representing advertising associations and businesses. The DAA is positioning the poll, which was conducted by Zogby Analytics, as the latest piece of evidence that a with broad industry participation can offer meaningful protections for consumer privacy on the Web. The DAA is the group behind the Advertising Options icon that participating ad networks and advertisers—including heavy-hitters like Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft—are incorporating into their ads to provide users notice about how information about their interests is being collected and the ability to limit that type of tracking. Each month, more than 1 trillion ads containing the DAA icon are served globally, according to the group. Formed three years ago, the DAA has been working to provide consumers with information and tools to understand and manage the data that is being collected about them online, while warning against and applications available on the Web.
Dear Internet bots and sockpuppets: Your days are numbered, because the Beehive ID service is out to spot the frauds online.
What Microsoft puts in its upcoming touch-based Office suite will be a huge test for the company, analysts said. "There's really nothing out there in the mobile world that provides anything near the power of Office on the desktop," said Ross Rubin of Reticle Research in an interview last week. "It will be a massive challenge to preserve even the majority of that functionality." Microsoft has said it will release touch-enabled versions of the —Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint, and Word—but has provided no clues of what that suite will be like. Nor has it disclosed a timetable for the touch-based suite, although rumors have pegged a ship date in the first half of 2014. "We are working on touch-first versions for our core apps in the Office suite, Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and we will bring these apps to Windows devices, and also to other devices ... at a proper timetable," is the most that company executive Qi Lu, who leads the Applications and Services Group, has said publicly.
Google is investing $608 million into its Finnish data center in a bid to meet mobile video demand. The investment will be used to expand the data center's capacity, according to . The site in Hamina, some 150 kilometers outside Helsinki, was opened two years ago after from a Finnish paper company for $272 million. It is currently one of three Google data centers in Europe. Google said the construction will provide jobs to 800 engineers and builders and the data centre's head count will rise from 90 to 125.
The number of brands used in spoofed emails that trick people into visiting malicious Web sites or clicking on malware attachments rose in the second quarter, an indication that phishers are hijacking the good names of businesses from new markets, a report says. The number of unique brands owned by businesses and other organizations that were was 614 in the fourth quarter of 2012. "The landscape continues to evolve as fraudsters seek new victims in untapped markets by targeting more brands," Ihab Shraim, contributing analyst and chief information security officer for MarkMonitor, said in the report. Brands within the payment and financial services industries remained the most popular, used in three-quarters of attacks. Hijacked payment services brands were the favorite at 48 percent.
Consumers would allow a computer to drive their car if doing so would cut their insurance rates by 80 percent, according to a survey by CarInsurance.com.
Members of the Internet Engineering Task Force discussed at its meeting in Vancouver, Canada last week how the organization could turn its plan to protect the web from government spying into action. IETF chair Jari Arkko also In his speech, Arkko suggested two main tenets to the plan extending SSL-like encryption to all pages of the Internet, and improving encryption algorithms. To encourage businesses and website operators to adopt these methods, Arkko suggested making them part of the HTTP 2.0 protocol, which is about a year away from submission as a proposed standard. The IETF convened for its meeting earlier in the week, sparking the longer conversation that is needed to put these and other plans into place. Arkko provided an update on the IETF blog in a post titled "," explaining that the discussion at the meeting this week largely revolves around improving privacy on the web.
The FBI has offered large rewards for information that could help them catch a clutch of alleged cybercriminals, including an El Salvadoran national accused of selling a Trojan designed to spy on husbands or wives believed by their spouses to be cheating on them. The details published on the But it is the curious tale of Carlos Enrique Perez-Melara that offers the most more unusual case. The FBI has been when a warrant was issued for his arrest in connection with the "Lover Spy" spyware program designed to "catch a cheating lover" that was distributed to victims as an electronic greetings card. It's not known whether the suspect is still in the U.S., but the FBI accuses him of selling his program to 1000 customers who then used it to infect possibly several thousand others as part of his San Diego-based business.
Apple is investigating what caused an iPad Air to explode in an Australian Vodafone store, prompting a store evacuation.
Researchers have found a new way to tune the radio frequency in smartphones and other wireless devices that promises to reduce costs and improve performance of semiconductors used in defense, satellite, and commercial communications. Semiconductor Research Corp. (SRC) and Northeastern University in Boston presented the research findings at the 58th Magnetism and Magnetic Materials Conference in Denver last week. Nian Sun, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at Northeastern, said he's been working on the process since 2006, when he received National Science Foundation grants for the research. "In September, we had a breakthrough," he said in a telephone interview. "We didn't celebrate with champagne exactly, but we were happy."
Passengers in flight could make voice calls and exchange text messages using a new service from Gogo, but that doesn't mean your seatmate will be able to blab all through your next flight. Gogo's Text & Talk service uses the company's on many major airlines. The company has already launched Text & Talk with some business aviation customers and is talking to commercial airlines about providing it for their passengers. It could be offered by itself or bundled with regular Gogo W-Fi, the company said. For travelers worried about hearing one side of a conversation all the way from Los Angeles to New York, the introduction of Text & Talk isn't necessarily the end of the world. Airlines can still dictate whether passengers can make voice calls, and most U.S. airlines don't allow them despite the introduction of in-flight Wi-Fi and Internet-based voice services such as Skype.
The engineer who oversaw development of Apple's Siri technology is now at Samsung building an online service for linking together the "Internet of things."
and shown that it works just as a traditionally manufactured gun. , the pistol is a replica of the storied .45-caliber, M1911 semi-automatic that served as the U.S. military’s standard-issue sidearm for more than 70 years. Solid Concept demonstrated the gun by firing 50 rounds with it. The accuracy? At more than 30 yards, the gun was able to strike a target bull’s-eye several times, Solid Concepts said. The company’s 3D printed .45 caliber M1911 pistol is shown above. , a single-shot plastic weapon made by Defense Distributed. That weapon didn’t prove to be reliable after multiple rounds were fired through it.
, an Israeli startup, has developed a cloud platform that uses efficiency, cooperation, and composure engines to extract more than 400 variants of moods by listening to a person’s voice. Imagine if cars could listen to a driver’s voice and know if he was prone to road rage or too tired to drive safely. Or if Siri could listen to an iPhone user talk and offer to play songs based on the person’s mood. These things are possible, says Beyond Verbal vice president of marketing Dan Emodi, who thinks the technology will usher in a multi-billion dollar market of emotionally-enhanced applications installed in voice-enabled devices. “We think this is such a disruptive thing [because] today machines do a lot of things, they understand [a person] typing inputs into his machine but they also understand what we click, what we touch, and where we are… but none of these help machines know how we feel and what we mean,” Emodi says. “Our goal is to introduce that emotional understanding to machines because we believe that this is the most important non-existing interface out there. And understanding the dimension of emotions has a lot of applications.” Since the Tel Aviv-based company opened up its API earlier this year, Emodi says manufacturers and developers are using the Beyond Verbal computing engines for all sorts of applications that he expects to see coming to light in the first half of 2014. He says several automotive manufacturers are experimenting with the technology as are developers who are working on everything from apps that coach people who are socially awkward or want to become better public speakers to those that can help you know which people in your life are most emotionally draining.
Enterprise open-source software vendor Red Hat is keeping an eye on the development of 64-bit ARM processors for servers, building up expertise in case the nascent platform takes hold in the data center. “You don’t see us in the market today with commercial offerings, but what we are building a competency ahead of some of the 64-bit technology that is coming. So further down the line, if we do have a need to respond to the market, we will have the capability to do that,” said Jon Masters, chief ARM architect at Red Hat. Masters spoke Friday at the USENIX LISA (Large Installation System Administration) conference in Washington, D.C. The ARM processor represents a “sea change in computing,” Masters said. While already the dominant architecture for smartphone and embedded computing devices, ARM processors could also play a role in the data center. Over the past year, servers based on ARM processors have started to show up in the server market. HP is already selling ARM-based servers with its Moonshot line. For the data center, because of its low-power design, ARM could bring about an age of hyperscale computing, in which thousands of tiny compute nodes can be packed into a single server rack. “It is a fundamental difference in terms of the sheer scale of what we will be able to build in the near future,” Masters said.
Despite the frothy headlines stirred by Twitter's initial public offering, tech is not in a bubble of the sort that arose before the 2000 dot-com crash. There is no doubt, however, that the stock market is hot, and that has led to a spate of IPOs. After setting an IPO price of $26, Twitter shares shot up to $50.09 Thursday before closing at $44.90. Shares closed at $41.64 Friday, but the company's market capitalization was still about $22.5 billion. Not bad for a company that has yet to make a profit. Twitter is just the marquee name in a roster of other tech companies that have gone public lately. Just this week, security and storage company Barracuda Networks, telecom networking software provider Mavenir Systems, and web development platform maker Wix.com went public. Technology companies are riding a wave of IPOs. There were 32 public offerings in October, more than in any other month since November 2007. With a total of 15 IPOs launched this week alone, November could bring an even greater number of offerings.
After a year's hiatus, Blizzard Entertainment returned to the Anaheim Convention Center this week to host the 7th BlizzCon fan event. “From everyone at Blizzard, thank you for being here. Welcome home," said Blizzard CEO Mike Morhaime as he took the stage on Friday to kick off the BlizzCon keynote address. "I love you!" screamed a man in the crowd. BlizzCon is first and foremost a show for the fans, but there's always a decent smorgasbord of news about Blizzard's games sandwiched between the festivities. This year's keynote was no different, as Blizzard's finest took the stage to announce a new World of Warcraft expansion, new platforms and details about Hearthstone, Heroes of the Storm, and more.
The rocky rollout of Windows 8.1 should serve as a reminder for consumers, software developers, hardware vendors, enterprise IT pros, and Microsoft itself that a period of careful testing and analysis must precede the release and installation of an operating system update. After it shipped on Oct. 17, Windows 8.1 in certain scenarios clashed with incompatible software, crashed due to outdated firmware, and stumbled over unrecognized drivers. Affected users faced different problems, including computers that couldn’t boot up, peripherals that malfunctioned, software that couldn’t be run, and OS installations that couldn’t be completed. Some issues have been resolved while others have not. “With Windows 8 shipping for more than a year and almost being a beta release for 8.1, the nature of the problems people are experiencing [does seem] to be unusual,” said Gartner analyst Michael Silver via email.
Microsoft hasn’t taken the first-generation Surface Pro tablet’s endurance woes lying down. After subpar battery life tempered enthusiasm for the original, the Surface Pro 2 upped its face time to 6 hours—still not great for a slate, but a 20-percent improvement over its predecessor. Then, shortly after the Surface Pro 2 shipped, Microsoft pushed out a firmware update that promised yet more battery life. Could refined software give the Surface Pro 2 hardware an even bigger boost? Yes—but the gains vary greatly depending on the way you use the tablet. firmware update and post-firmware update. (Thanks Tony!) Every benchmark was run twice to ensure consistency, which is why it took us a few days to post this.
Before you work yourself into a lather, please understand that Microsoft has been saying since June that the update would be required.
in the virtual currency. He is not taking the problem to the police. A peer-to-peer currency not backed by any government, Bitcoins are in many ways more similar to cash than to the more common credit card and PayPal methods of exchanging money over the Internet. Once the coins are out of your hands, you can't get them back via a third party (such as a credit card company). You can't easily trace where your Bitcoins (BTCs) have been. posted Thursday, he claims to have lost more than 4,100 Bitcoins--approximately 1.1 million American dollars--in separate attacks on October 23 and 26. "The attacker compromised the hosting account through compromising email accounts (some very old, and without phone numbers attached, so it was easy to reset). The attacker was able to bypass 2FA due to a flaw on the server host side." . "Also, don't ever use anything that Tradefortress has made ever again."
The person who became known on the Internet for yelling at servers is now becoming famous for another, somewhat related, feat, creating a new type of data visualization for characterizing system performance. Brendan Gregg, lead performance engineer at cloud provider Joyent, has developed a visualization technique called a flame graph that can be effective for charting how system resources such as CPUs and memory are used. It has subsequently been picked up by a number of engineers who have used it to enhance popular diagnostic tools such as DTrace and Windows XPerf. (Large Installation System Administration) conference in Washington, D.C. Flame graphs could save hours of diagnostic time for system administrators, performance engineers, support staff and others trying to figure out why a system is running more slowly than expected. “We’ve had stack traces for a long while, but what Brendan has done has given us a really fast way of seeing aspects that weren’t easily visible before,” said one attendee of the presentation, noting that flame graphs would have come in handy for him at work during a recent dispute with a software vendor over a performance issue.
(PCI DSS) and corresponding Payment Application Data Security Standard (PA-DSS), adding new security requirements and guidance for payment-card industry organizations, including merchants, payment processors, financial institutions, and service providers. The new version will go into effect on Jan. 1, but organizations will have until Dec. 31, 2014, to make the transition from PCI DSS 2.0. In addition, some of the new security requirements will have the status of best practices until June 30, 2015. The effectiveness of the PCI DSS, whose primary goal is to help organizations secure cardholder data, is disputed in the security community. That’s partly because there have been many cases of merchants and payment processors that suffered significant cardholder data breaches despite having passed PCI DSS compliance assessments. The PCI Security Standards Council recognized this problem and included a set of best practices in the new version of the standard that aims to make PCI DSS implementation part of business-as-usual activities and ensure that organizations involved in payment card processing remain compliant between annual assessments.
relate to Javascript PDF usage, spoofing the address bar, image decoding, the offline cache, and various memory hazards (e.g. null pointers, non-deallocated blocks). Version 25 also adds a much needed gaming feature: Web Audio. The JavaScript interface to HTML 5 audio is now fully supported.
The U.S. Department of Justice is scrutinizing sellers on underground online marketplaces, and on Thursday said federal agents had arrested one person for alleged illegal weapons sale on underground market “Black Market Reloaded” in an elaborate sting operation. U.S. officials shut down about a month ago the “Silk Road,” an underground market which was accessible only through the Tor anonymity service and used the anonymous bitcoin virtual currency to keep the identity of sellers and buyers private. Silk Road is alleged to have been a thriving market for drugs and other illegal products and services, including fake passports. The National Crime Agency in the U.K. also arrested in October some persons suspected of selling illegal drugs on Silk Road. by a person styling himself as Dread Pirate Roberts, the handle linked to Ross William Ulbricht who is charged by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation with owning and running the original Silk Road. The government is also going after illegal sellers on the marketplaces. “Online black market sellers should take note: we aren’t just targeting the administrators of these sites, which can pop up again elsewhere,” Paul J. Fishman, U.S. attorney for New Jersey district, said in a statement. “If you buy or sell illegal goods on an underground marketplace, law enforcement is watching.”
Newly unveiled documents show the barges will be more than mere floating boxy showcases.
will finally land on U.S. store shelves in January. Panasonic has yet to release a specific debut date, but don't get too excited—you probably can't afford one anyway. With a $6,000 price tag, the Toughpad 4K UT-MB5 slate is squarely targeted at the professional market. (The hands-on video above comes from our time with the slate at IFA 2013 in September.) The 20-inch slab will come loaded with Microsoft's touch-centric Windows 8.1 Pro, but the biggest selling point is naturally its IPS Alpha display, which sports a 3840-by-2560 (commonly dubbed "4K") resolution at 230 pixels per inch and a 15:10 aspect ratio. Under the hood, the tablet features a dual-core 1.9GHz Intel “Ivy Bridge” Core i5-3437U vPro processor, an Nvidia GeForce 745M GPU with 2GB VRAM, 256GB SSD, 8GB of RAM, 802.11a/b/g/n Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 4.0, USB 3.0, SDXC card slot, a 720p front-facing camera, and the Toughpad's iconic punishment-proof design. Panasonic also plans to offer a cradle for users who want to use the tablet as an all-in-one.
have a permanent fix ready in time for next week’s Patch Tuesday blitz. an admistrator, the hacker will have the full run of your machine. on infiltrated PCs, via emails such as the one at right. The following Microsoft software is vulnerable to the exploit: