The competition between Google and Apple hits the road: Google will reportedly team with Audi to offer Android-powered in-car information and entertainment.
A special hacking unit of the U.S. National Security Agency intercepts deliveries of new computer equipment en route to plant spyware, according to a on Sunday from Der Spiegel, a German publication. The method, called “interdiction,” is one of the most successful operations conducted by the NSA’s Office of Tailored Access Operations (TAO), which specializes in infiltrating computers, wrote the publication, citing a top-secret document. ”If a target person, agency or company orders a new computer or related accessories, for example, TAO can divert the shipping delivery to its own secret workshops,” Der Spiegel wrote. The workshops, called “load stations,” install malware or hardware components that give the NSA access to the computer, it wrote.
I would say yes. If your . First, shut off the PC. Until everything is fixed, you want that drive spinning as little as possible. Preferably, not at all.
Samsung Electronics has announced a new chip that will make it possible for the company and others to build smartphones and tablets with up to 4GB of RAM. Samsung has developed the industry’s first 8 Gigabit LPDDR4 (low power double data rate) mobile DRAM. By combining four of them, a high-end smartphone or tablet can get 4GB of RAM, on Monday. Today many expensive smartphones have 2GB of RAM, while Samsung’s own has 3GB. The memory increase and performance improvement offered by Samsung’s chip will result in faster, more responsive applications and will open the door for more advanced features as well as higher resolution displays, according to the company. The product also consumes less power than current memory chipsets, it said. The chip will start shipping next year and it will be used by large screen smartphones, tablets and ultra-slim notebooks, according to Samsung. Some of the devices will also have 4K or UHD screens, the company said without offering any product details.
As New Year’s resolutions go, is a perennial Top 10 contender, somewhere between “lose weight” and “save money.” But if you’ve ever resolved to digitize your documents before, you've learned that talking about it is one thing. Actually doing it is a tricky proposition. If you’re like most people, you’re already comfortable with managing your incoming digital data; it’s the lingering paper that’s the problem. To be honest, you’ll probably never stop every last piece of paper from crossing your desk, so scanning it is essential. Scanning can be a complex process that requires solid hardware, plenty of storage (either offline or online), and no small amount of personal dedication. Here’s how to streamline all of this and make scanning as painless as possible. You’ll quickly be lamenting another failed resolution if your hardware isn’t up to the task. The good news is that most printer manufacturers now produce capable all-in-one devices that will give you quality scanning in the same chassis as a color printer, copier, and fax machine, often for $200 or less. Reviewing scanners is outside the scope of this story, but . Be sure, as you page through the reviews, that you consider only devices that include a sheet feeder and a duplexer. The best intentions to reduce paper have been torpedoed by having to place originals on a flatbed scanner one at a time or dealing with discombobulated scans with their pages out of order.
There’s something ironic about third-party uninstallers: They make you add another tool to get rid of the crud that’s already installed on your computer. Windows’ own Programs and Features tool does a good job of letting you browse through installed applications and remove what you don’t need—so IObit Uninstaller 3 needs to work hard to convince users it really is needed. IObit Uninstaller 3 tries to woo you with pretty looks. The first piece of good news is that IObit Uninstaller 3 doesn’t need to be installed in the traditional sense of the word—it won’t make you Next-Next-Next through a setup wizard before you can use it. You just need to run it, click through a single UAC prompt, and start removing software you don’t want. It may feel like you’re running a portable app, but IObit Uninstaller 3 install itself, in a sense: It adds a button to the Programs and Features tool, which serves as a handy reminder that you have the app installed (seeing as how most people don’t uninstall software on a daily basis).
Do you ever wonder what people 2000 years from now will think of our current society when they discover that we spent our days watching videos of angry-looking cats? I don’t, and it’s probably for the best. In any case, here are the biggest, best, bespoke memes that disrupted 2013. I apologize in advance for all the lost productivity. I’m not going to lie: I hate the Harlem Shake meme. Hate hate hate. And apparently, the rest of the Internet got tired of it quickly, too. The meme . As incomprehensible as the Harlem Shake was, “goats screaming like humans” is even more bewildering—but probably more amusing. And it’s way more self-explanatory: Do a search for “goats screaming” and you’ll get videos like inserted into music videos. And that’s only the beginning.
Like a juggler walking away with dozens of objects suspended in the air, Steve Ballmer is leaving his successor at Microsoft not only a tough act to follow but an even tougher act to continue. During his last months at the company, Ballmer has set in place a string of changes that won’t be anywhere near completion when he goes, even if his replacement doesn’t come on board until next August, the That means has to come up to speed fast and have the talent to implement Ballmer’s plans or to change them mid-course without having things fall apart. Here is a look at some of what Ballmer leaves and how it might affect the products and services Microsoft sells.
Browser problems are the most common complaints of and Fire HDX tablet owners, an online community of troubleshooters said. San Mateo, California-based Fixya mined 10,000 user-generated reports related to Apple’s iPad Air and Retina-equipped the second-generation tablet that replaced the poorly-received Surface RT of 2012, to come up with its conclusions. Browser gripes topped the charts of the iPad Air and the 8.9-inch said Fixya, while the surfing app tied for second on the iPad Mini’s top-five-beef list. Nearly a third—30 percent—of the reported problems with the Air and 25 percent of those with the Fire stemmed from the tablets’ bundled browsers, Safari and Silk, respectively. On the Retina iPad Mini, 20 percent of complaints targeted Safari, the same percentage as aimed ire at the paucity of storage space on the least expensive model.
Cybercriminals are using third-party app sites to peddle reverse-engineered versions—essentially counterfeit or pirated—of almost all the most popular paid apps available on the Google Play and Apple App Stores, software firm Arxan has discovered. The firm uncovered this parallel app universe in a similar piece of research last year and . Looking at a total of 230 apps—the top 100 paid apps and top 15 free apps for Android and iOS—Arxan found that 100 percent of the top paid apps on Android and 56 percent on iOS were being impersonated in a compromised form on grey markets. For free apps, the analysis found that 73 percent of Android apps in the top 15 existed in a bogus form on third-party stores, slightly worse than the 53 percent for iOS. Arxan also looked at popular financial apps, 20 from each platform, finding that a half of the Android samples existed as hacked versions with a quarter for Android.
Bosch, a company best known as a maker appliances, including stoves, dishwashers, washing machines, and coffee makers, is increasing its focus on the Internet of Things. Germany-based Bosch has created a new firm, Bosch Connected Devices and Solutions, “for the Internet of things and services.” The Internet of Things will at a time. Sensor-rich devices monitoring Web-enabled apps can put the worried homeowner at ease. "Did I remember to turn the stove off before leaving the house? Is the refrigerator door open?" The Internet of Things will provide the answer.
Some have suggested that Microsoft sell off its Xbox franchise as a way to cut losses and eliminate a distraction from more important things, but the video game console is an important part of the company’s overall plan going forward. Xbox is one of four devices named by CEO Steve Ballmer as part of ”Interactivity takes engagement and makes things serious; it really requires differentiated hardware, apps and services,” he says in a outlining Microsoft’s mission. But one estimate puts Xbox losses at $2 billion, and an analysis of the hardware costs indicate on a razor thin margin. Profitability is hard to gauge given that Xbox results are lumped in on the balance sheet with Android phone royalties, Skype, and Windows Phone.
In the daily deluge of email, it's all too easy to send a message and never get a response (and, on the other end, receive an email and forget to respond). This Gmail script makes it easy to find the emails you've sent to someone who could use a little nudging or reminder. The , written by Jonathan Kim, combs through your emails that are between 5 and 14 days old where you were the last person to respond. It labels those emails "No Response" so you can easily check if any of those require a polite followup email. E.g., "Hi Joe, Just checking in to see what you think about this. Let me know if you have any questions." (Note to PR folk: Not "Did you get my email??" times ten.) To use the script, paste Kim's code into a new Google Script and set it to run on a daily schedule. (I love these cron job-like scripts for Gmail.) You can add the "No Response" label to your inbox section for top-of-mind prompting. One of the few reasons you might want to use this instead of, say, a service like Boomerang, is the labels are applied to email threads you've already sent. It pretty much just works automatically. Yes, you have to still check the No Response label, but short of getting a personal assistant to handle your email for you and follow up on all the loose threads, this is as good as it gets for now.
Even as Microsoft promised to speed up work on a re-release for a flawed firmware update, customers continued to damn the company for the fiasco. earlier this month, about a week after it shipped the non-security fixes on December 10. Surface Pro 2 owners had complained that the update reduced their tablets’ battery life and spontaneously changed how the devices went into or out of the power-saving sleep mode. Originally, Microsoft said that it would re-release the firmware update “after the holidays,” which the company confirmed should be interpreted as some point after New Years Day, or January 1, 2014. However, this week the Redmond, Washington company revised its timeline. “We are working to release an alternative update package as soon as possible,” a spokeswoman said via email on Thursday. She declined to be more specific about the re-release’s availability, reiterating only that it would be ASAP.
The Blackhole Exploit kit was good, so good in fact that criminals are having trouble finding anything with the capabilities to take its place, security firm Websense has noticed. According to the , phishing campaigns sent via the important Cutwail bot that once made extensive use of the kit have been forced to experiment with a mixture of conventional Zip attachment spam and an alternative exploit kit, Magnitude. The change happened in October, within days of the dubbed "Paunch." Since then, the gangs have been forced to chop and change new attack strategies, achieving mixed levels of success, Websense said. It turns out that attachment spam is still effective when it gets past filters as are old-style phishing attacks using traditional lures such as "work at home" and dieting. Often tactics are what distinguishes one gang form another on Cutwail, for instance the prominent "Zeus GameOver" operation that specialises in collecting bank logins.
Nokia says iOS 7 has harmed the user experience of its mapping app, but the company has show little appetite for keeping Here Maps up to date since its iOS debut more than a year ago.
When International CES opens in Las Vegas in early January, a flood of wearable computing devices, including smartwatches, will be on display. The fledgling is tiny compared to that for smartphones, or even wearable devices like Google Glass or smart bands that cater to fitness and health-monitoring needs. Still, the smartwatch phenomenon promises to blossom in 2014 as experts sometime in the fall. Even Microsoft is reportedly working on one. To achieve any degree of greatness, though, these major tech innovators and their smaller competitors must overcome some significant hurdles.
Police in San Francisco have arrested a 16-year old resident of the city on suspicion of murder and attempted robbery after a cellphone theft apparently went wrong earlier this month. The suspect, who was not named because he is a juvenile, was one of a group who approached someone using a cellphone in the street at around 11pm on Saturday, December 14, according to the San Francisco Police Department. One of the suspects demanded the cellphone and another suspect produced a handgun while others were going through the victim’s possessions, the police said. ”The victim offered no resistance and was complying with the robbery suspects demands when the armed suspect shot the robbery victim,” San Francisco police said in a statement. “The shot glanced off the victims face and struck one of the robbery suspects, killing him.”
The techniques used by hackers to shoppers suggests that the cyber crooks have found a troubling new way to stay ahead of the latest fraud detection processes. Security blogger , who first reported the Target data breach news earlier this month, said that compromised cards are being marketed online with information on the state, city, and ZIP code of the Target store where they were used. Fraud experts say the location information will likely allow buyers of the stolen data to use spoofed versions of cards issued to people in their immediate vicinity, Krebs wrote. “This lets crooks who want to use the cards for in-store fraud avoid any knee-jerk fraud defenses in which a financial institution might block transactions that occur outside the legitimate cardholder’s immediate geographic region,” he said. This is believed to be the first time that security experts have observed hyper-localized selling of stolen credit and debit card information following a retail breach.
From an inside look at the technology used at a Major League Baseball game to a detailed breakdown of how you’re likely upsetting your Facebook friends, we put together a lot of videos in 2013. Here are some of our favorite videos to appear on the site. Our . But our favorite part of that video series was easily this look at how technology is used to maintain security inside the ballpark.
It’s a pretty fair bet that, today, many of you are playing with (wearing, riding, or at least enjoying) some toy you got earlier this week. Since I know a few people for whom those toys are video games, this seems like a good time to suggest that—though those games have over the years for being addictive, teaching violence, and leading to a nation of layabouts—they also teach skills necessary to working in high tech. I’m not just making this up as an excuse to Science supports the idea that not only do video games teach worthwhile skills but that they do it as well as other ways of learning things. And, when I say video games, I’m not talking about only learning or “sandbox” games. First-person shooters teach good stuff, too. Studies support gaming skills According to , video games strengthen cognitive skills such as spatial navigation, reasoning, memory, and perception. And this is particularly true for first-person shooters. According to the study's authors, a 2013 meta-analysis found that playing commercially available shooter video games improved a player’s capacity to think about objects in three dimensions better than other kinds of games and just as well as academic courses to enhance these same skills. “Previous research has established the power of spatial skills for achievement in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics,” says Isabela Granic, one of the study’s authors and PhD, of Radboud University Nijmegen in The Netherlands.
Trust in the security industry has taken a blow with that RSA was paid by the U.S. National Security Agency to provide a way to crack its encryption. RSA denies the Reuters published Friday that said the NSA paid RSA $10 million to use a flawed encryption formula. The agency-developed Dual Elliptic Curve Deterministic Random Bit Generator (Dual EC DRBG) was used in RSA’s BSAFE product. The report shook up the security industry, because of RSA’s influence. The company’s annual user conference in San Francisco is one of the largest security events of the year. On Monday, Mikko Hypponen, a widely know security expert, sent a letter to RSA for the 2014 RSA Conference, because of RSA’s dealings with the NSA. In a statement released last week, RSA said, “We categorically deny this allegation.”
The president of the United States says he’s not “allowed” to own an iPhone, which is why he’s . It’s a politically sensitive subject because the founder and CEO Steve Jobs. He’d love to pander to buy-America voters. (Obama is also probably not “allowed” to have an Android phone.) Of course, neither the president nor the Secret Service is willing to say exactly is the unpredictable nature of both iPhone and Android apps. Sure, there’s a lot of flat-out malware flying around online, most of which looks like regular, legitimate apps but in fact are either malware or they compromise privacy or security in some way.
From .
No need to dig through that dusty closet and find your Atari 2600. Play Pacman, Space Invaders, Donkey Kong and more, all from the comfort of your browser.
Jesper Ovesen räumt seinen Posten als Aufsichtsratschef bei der Nokia-Tochter NSN (Nokia Solutions and Networks). Der Däne trete ab, sobald die Finnen ihr Handygeschäft an Microsoft abgegeben haben, teilte Nokia am Montag mit.
Auf der Aktionärshauptversammlung des französischen IT-Dienstleisters Atos, der auch in der Schweiz über eine Niederlassung verfügt, am vergangenen Freitag wurde über die Zukunftspläne des Unternehmens entschieden. Die anwesenden Aktionäre stimmten den Plänen des Managements zu. Auf dem Aktionärstreffen waren 67,65 Prozent der Aktionäre vertreten.
Auf der Auktionsplattform Ricardo sind Apple-Produkte besonders gefragt. Gleich vier Modellbezeichnungen aus dem Apple-Sortiment haben es 2013 auf die Liste der zehn am häufigsten auf Ricardo eingegebenen Suchbegriffe geschafft.
Das Fraunhofer-Institut für Produktionsanlagen und Konstruktionstechnik (IPK) hat an der weltweit einmaligen Technologie seit 2007 getüftelt. "Das Rätsel ist gelöst, die Forschung abgeschlossen", sagte der Bundesbeauftragte für die Stasi-Unterlagen, Roland Jahn, der Nachrichtenagentur dpa. Aus Papierschnipseln seien bereits 16.300 Blätter digital zusammengesetzt worden. Er erwarte neue Erkenntnisse, sagte der frühere DDR-Oppositionelle. "Wir hoffen, mit den Akten die Westarbeit der Stasi tiefer beleuchten zu können." Die Stasi war Inlands- und Auslandsgeheimdienst der DDR.
Der US-Geheimdienst NSA hat nach Informationen des "Spiegels" zahlreiche kommerzielle IT-Produkte geknackt und Schwachstellen für Spionagezwecke ausgenutzt. Darunter seien auch Produkte grosser US-Firmen wie Microsoft, Cisco, Juniper oder Dell, ausserdem solche der chinesischen Firma Huawei.
Wikileaks-Gründer Julian Assange, Internetaktivist Jacob Appelbaum und Snowden-Begleiterin Sarah Harrison richteten auf dem 30. Chaos Communication Congress (30C3) am Sonntagabend einen nachdrücklichen Appell an die Hacker. Sie sollten Geheimdienste und andere Institutionen infiltrieren und wie Edward Snowden geheime Informationen öffentlich machen.
Der Internetriese Google will einem Pressebericht zufolge zusammen mit Audi IT- und Unterhaltungstechnik für Autos entwickeln. Der Schulterschluss soll nächste Woche auf der Verbraucherelektronikmesse in Las Vegas angekündigt werden, berichtet das „Wall Street Journal“ (Montagausgabe) unter Berufung auf informierte Kreise.
NSA-Skandal, Tumblr-Übernahme, Twitter-Börsengang, Amazon-Kritik: Das zu Ende gehende Jahr war für die Internet-Gemeinde überaus ereignisreich. Wobei der NSA-Skandal alles in den Schatten stellte. Nachfolgend eine Chronologie der Netz-Ereignisse.
Eine unter gleich vier seltenen Erbkrankheiten leidende Studentin hat in Italien eine lebhafte Debatte über Tierversuche ausgelöst. Die 25-jährige Caterina Simonsen sprach sich auf Facebook für Tierversuche zum Zwecke medizinischer Forschung aus.
Baidu übernimmt vom chinesischen Online-Spiele-Hersteller Perfect World die Online-Plattform PW Literature. Das chinesische Google-Pendant sichert sich damit ein Must-Have des heimischen Internet-Geschäftes. Baidu legt dafür 191,5 Millionen Renminibi (31,5 Millionen Dollar) auf den Tisch.