Taiwanese computer maker Acer has named Jason Chen, vice president of worldwide sales and marketing at Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing, as its new president and CEO, effective Jan. 1. Acer’s board of directors chose Chen as the company’s CEO Monday. Acer founder Stan Shih will continue to serve as chairman of the company, Acer said in a press release. Shih, in a statement, called Chen “the ideal executive to lead our transformation.”
Sony Corp. of America has agreed to sell its Gracenote music metadata business to the Tribune media conglomerate for $170 million. Gracenote maintains a database of music data that’s used by streaming media services, mobile apps and in-car entertainment systems for finding and recommending tracks and providing information about them to listeners. Among its better known customers are Apple and Spotify. Tribune plans to combine Gracenote with its own Tribune Media Services (TMS) division, which maintains a similar database about movies and TV shows. Among other uses, TMS’s database feeds the program guides of cable operators. With 550 million look-ups per day and metadata about more than 180 million tracks, Gracenote’s database is the largest source of music data in the world, according to Gracenote. The company has also been expanding into video information and provides that to some service providers in Europe. Gracenote was founded in 1998 as CDDB (Compact Disc Database) and changed its name to Gracenote in 2000. Sony’s U.S. business bought the company in 2008. Sony uses Gracenote in its Vaio PCs, Music Unlimited online service and other offerings, and the Tribune acquisition doesn’t end those arrangements.
A U.S. senator has called on the Federal Trade Commission to investigate Target’s security practices after the large retailer reported a data breach affecting 40 million customer credit and debit cards. Senator Richard Blumenthal, a Connecticut Democrat, urged the agency to begin an immediate investigation. “If Target failed to adequately and appropriately protect its customers’ data, then the breach we saw this week was not just a breach of security; it was a breach of trust,” Blumenthal wrote in a . The breach could expose Target customers to “significant and potentially permanent harm,” Blumenthal wrote.”Those Target customers who have their data misused by hackers or thieves could lose their good credit and in turn their ability to purchase the goods and services they need for their well being and the well being of their families,” he added. Even customers whose stolen data will never ultimately be misused must live with the fear and uncertainty of knowing that it could be.” Blumenthal said he will push to give the agency more authority to penalize companies that have large data breaches. The FTC doesn’t have the authority to impose fines for data breaches.
People worry about losing their credit card number every time they buy something online. But as shows us, shopping at a brick and mortar store can be just as dangerous. After all, they too are connected to the Internet. We still don’t know exactly how the Target breach occurred. Last week, Target admitted that hackers had acquired the names, credit card numbers, and expiration dates from somewhere in the neighborhood of 40 million customer credit cards. But in all fairness to Target, a large part of the problem comes from a nation-wide, antiquated credit card system. An by Jonathan Fahey called the United States “the juiciest target for hackers hunting credit card information,” and warned that things “will get worse before they get better.”
An iOS update to America's favorite disappearing message app added a few new features.
GoSmart users will be able to access Facebook and Facebook messenger without any monthly data plan.
The first iOS 7 jailbreak is here, but it arrived with some app piracy issues for Chinese users and no support for the Cydia app store.
The U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) paid $10 million to vendor RSA in a “secret” deal to incorporate a deliberately flawed encryption algorithm into widely used security software, according to a Reuters report that is reigniting controversy about the government’s involvement in setting security standards. The contract was part of an NSA campaign to weaken encryption standards in order to aid the agency’s surveillance programs, on Friday. The report, based on two sources that Reuters said were familiar with the contract, has sparked a series of headlines that are stoking the ongoing debate about NSA surveillance tactics. The NSA declined immediate comment.
HP’s Spectre 13 runs Windows 8, but it doesn’t contort, flip, swivel, or do any of the other impractical tricks that look so fun in advertisements. It’s not a tablet , either. It’s just a regular ol’ Ultrabook. A very, very good Ultrabook. Windows 8 has Microsoft and PC manufacturers like HP trapped between a rock and a hard place. The new operating system in a world increasingly dominated by sleek, shiny touchscreen devices. That gambit has largely failed, leaving hardware manufacturers little recourse but to throw devices at the wall to see what might stick. So we get 2-in-1s, convertibles, detachables, and all manner of confusing hybrids, when what we really want is a thin-and-light notebook with a great keyboard, a high-res display, and the power to tackle nearly any workload. So how near does the Spectre 13 come to delivering that ideal design? Pretty darn close. It also leverages one of Windows 8’s key features—touch—to deliver a significant innovation in usability: An almost comically wide touchpad dubbed the Control Zone. More on that shortly. HP's Spectre 13 boasts a very attractive industrial design.
The latest incarnation of Dell’s XPS 15 is the laptop of my dreams. I’m not being hyperbolic. I adore everything about this machine, from its slim, sleek exterior to its powerful Haswell processor and discrete Nvidia graphics card. I admire its 15.6-inch QHD display and its speedy 512GB solid-state drive. I love that videos play smoothly and audio sounds excellent–with lots of depth and bass–through its built-in speakers. The only thing I’m expensive, but it is a lot of green. But you have to pay to play, so let’s take a deeper look at what all that cash delivers.
Apple plans to offer the iPhone to more than 760 million China Mobile customers next month, which could help it increase its share from the fifth position in this growing market. The company already sells its phones in China through two other carriers in the country—China Telecom and China Unicom—but a deal with China Mobile, the largest in the country, had eluded it for some time. One reason is that China Mobile uses a different wireless telecommunications standard from its competitors. As part of an agreement announced Sunday, Apple’s iPhone 5s and iPhone 5c will be available from China Mobile and Apple retail stores in China on January 17. Preregistration of the phones will begin on the carrier’s website and through its customer service hotline from Wednesday. The pricing of the iPhone 5s and iPhone 5c for China Mobile will be available at a later date, Apple said in a statement.
Palm prints, iris images, and mug shots are joining fingerprints in the FBI's database, which now relies on many biometric elements in investigations.
More than a decade after typosquatting became an Internet hazard, criminals and opportunists are still abusing misspelled domains on a scale that is leaving users and businesses out of pocket, consultancy has found. The company used its ImmuniWeb SaaS Phishing system that were close but not identical to legitimate domains used by ten well-known antivirus firms; for example, entering "kasperski.com" or "mcaffee.com." Of these, High-Tech Bridge detected 385 domains that appeared to be attempting to pass themselves off as one of these domains; just over 40 percent, or 164, turned out to be in some way fraudulent (such as redirecting to phishing sites, or displaying ads for bogus products and services). A further 73 were simply being squatted, presumably in the hope that one of the affected firms might buy them at some point. Interestingly, 107 had been registered by the antivirus firms themselves to avoid abuse, leaving only 41 being used by firms that happened to have a legitimate brand or trademark that could be confused with one of the firms.
While many smart devices are coming with more cool features, improved security isn't one of them.
When Kenneth Wayne Jennings, noted for holding the record for the longest winning streak of 74 games on the U.S. syndicated game show, bowed to IBM’s Watson as the new “Jeopardy!” champ in 2011, he quoted an episode of “The Simpsons” and wrote “I for one welcome our new computer overlords,” on his video screen. That was probably one small step for a computer but a giant leap for computing. It’s ironic to say that on the game show didn’t come out of the blue. The result was a culmination of over a decade of IBM’s research. The victory, however, wasn’t the end but the beginning of a new era. “It opened up a new chapter in information technology called cognitive computing—based on the idea of a natural interaction between systems and people,” says Zachary (Zach) Lemnios, vice president of strategy for IBM Research. And this evolving relationship between humans and machines was also the key theme of Gartner’s recent “Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies, 2013.” The analyst and consulting firm says it chose to feature the relationship between humans and machines due to the increased hype around smart machines, cognitive computing, and Systems augment humans It’s no secret that organizations today, across industry, are overwhelmed with so much data that they are unable to make time-critical decisions. Not only is the data growing by leaps and bounds it is also and forms. “These increasingly challenging times need organizations to make tighter decisions in tighter timelines with the consequence of each decision going up,” Lemnios said.
Criminals are sending markedly fewer phishing emails than a year ago, but they are now being more skillfully targeted, an end-of-year report by security firm Websense has found. According to Websense, phishing volumes have continued their journey downwards of recent years, falling to 0.5 percent of all email in 2013 from 1.12 percent the year before. Although good news on the face of it, when it comes to any measurement of security there is always a rub and in this case it is the rise of plausible subject lines capable of tricking users into opening attachments or links. The top ones experienced by Websense (which sells email filtering gateways) were
With all the we're having these days, it doesn't hurt to be vigilant for any suspicious activity. Your Microsoft account—linking SkyDrive, Outlook.com, Office webapps, Xbox, and possibly your PC—comes with a tool that shows you if any unauthorized parties tried to get into your account. It's much like Google's and Dropbox's "last activity" solution: Microsoft keeps a log of successful and unsuccessful sign-ins, incorrect password attempts, and so on—along with the IP address, a map, and other details of the attempted device. and click the "Recent activity" link in the left menu to see it. It looks like this:
You’ve only got a few more shopping days until Christmas, and you’re still not sure what to get—or even where to start. Not to worry—for the past month-and-a-half, we’ve been making a list and checking it twice for a wide array of laptops, scanners, and other hardware. We’ve put it all in one place, so you can know which products should be at the top of your list and what to keep in mind on those last-second shopping sprees. Looking for a portable? Here are our favorites: We also printer picks if you’re in the market for a new printer:
Now the owner of Boston Dynamics, Google rolls in to watch events at the DARPA Robotics Challenge.
Kanadischen Forschern ist es gelungen, SMS chemisch zu «verschicken»: Über kurze Distanzen werden Informationen in einem feinen Alkoholnebel übermittelt.
Mit dem Jailbreak für Apple-Geräte lassen sich die Gadgets von den Fesseln des iOS-Systems befreien. Die Installation ist simpel, noch aber sind wenige Funktionen kompatibel.
Apple hat einen Vertrag mit dem grössten Mobilfunkanbieter der Welt abgeschlossen: Dank der 700 Millionen Kunden von China Mobile hofft der US-Konzern, in China wieder mehr iPhones absetzen zu können.
Kommen 2014 die iWatch, gekrümmte iPhones oder gar der ominöse Apple-Fernseher? Firmenchef Tim Cook blickt in einem Schreiben zurück und kündigt «Grosses» fürs nächste Jahr an.
Ein Mail-Verschlüsselungsprogramm liess sich nur aufgrund der Geräusche des Computers hacken. Dazu reicht ein simples Mobiltelefon.
Erst hatte das Landgericht Köln Massenabmahnungen gegen Porno-Streaming ermöglicht, nun rudert es zurück. Auch die Betreiber von Redtube melden sich zu Wort.
Bei vielen Spielern läuft «Battlefield 4» entweder fehlerhaft oder gar nicht. Hersteller EA habe mit dem vorschnellen Release seine Aktionäre getäuscht, behauptet eine US-Kanzlei.
Kleider und Uhr lassen sich bereits ans Smartphone anschliessen. Nun soll dies auch für E-Zigaretten möglich werden - um das Rauchverhalten zu analysieren.
Der Kurznachrichtendienst Whatsapp vermeldet, dass mittlerweile 400 Millionen Menschen aktiv die App verwenden. Facebook hat nur noch knapp doppelt so viele Benutzer.
Disney hat mit «Star Wars Attack Squadrons» einen neuen Titel im beliebten Sternensaga-Universum angekündigt. Der Erwerb des Spiels soll umsonst sein. Das Geld holt sich der Hersteller später.
An einer New Yorker Uni ist ein voll funktionsfähiger Lautsprecher gedruckt worden. Das Forscherteam strebt nun komplexere Entwicklungen aus dem 3-D-Drucker an.
Ein Video zeigt einen intelligenten Sprachassistenten von Yahoo im Einsatz. Nur: Das Konkurrenzprodukt zu Siri und Google Voice gehört gar nicht dem Internetkonzern - noch nicht.
Zum Marktstart war die Sony-Konsole innert weniger Stunden praktisch überall ausverkauft. Nun vermelden Media Markt und Interdiscount, dass die Playstation 4 ab sofort wieder erhältlich ist.
Das Unternehmen Meta will Mitte 2014 seine futuristischen Spaceglasses auf den Markt bringen. Ein besonders grosses Dual-Display soll Konkurrent Google ausstechen.