Imagine being able to swap between two different app windows on the same screen. Crazy, huh? On a Windows PC or tablet, of course not. Ditto for large Samsung Android phones, phablets, and tablets. But on the Apple iPad and Windows phones, swiping back and forth between apps has not been part of the way users work. Until now, that is. If a
For the latest round of Microsoft’s monthly collection of software patches, the company has fixed critical issues in Internet Explorer (IE) and Windows that have already been used by malicious attackers to compromised systems. It is the software that Microsoft has not patched this month that is probably of greatest interest to attackers. Overall, Microsoft has issued eight bulletins this month, fixing 13 vulnerabilities in Windows, Internet Explorer and Office. None of these fixes are for Windows XP or Office 2003, both of which Microsoft
A flood of Internet users and net neutrality advocates called on the Federal Communications Commission to enact strong net neutrality rules, with many participants in an agency-sponsored Twitter chat Tuesday advocating utility-style regulations for broadband providers. Many participants in the Twitter chat—featuring Gigi Sohn, senior counsel for external affairs to FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler—urged the commission to scrap Wheeler’s recent net neutrality proposal that would allow broadband providers to engage in “commercially reasonable” traffic management. Instead, Wheeler should “have some dignity and spine” and force the Internet to become a “public utility,” wrote a Twitter user using the name Wesley Da’Nomad, a
Motorola's entry-level smartphone that makes us wish we could tolerate barebones performance and features just for its cuteness alone.
The feature, which will be added to more cities soon, is aimed at simplifying the booking procedure for mobile users.
Facebook is pushing for more email providers to use STARTTLS, a technology that encrypts emails as they pass between servers and clients, after an analysis showed that any SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) server that adds the feature now would start encrypting over half of its outbound email traffic. STARTTLS is an extension for several communication protocols, including IMAP and POP3, SMTP, FTP and XMPP and allows a plain text connection to be upgraded to an encrypted one using the TLS (Transport Layer Security) or SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) protocols. Researchers at Facebook recently analyzed a day’s worth of the company’s email logs to determine how widely STARTTLS is deployed among email servers around the world. The company is in a good position to run such a test because it sends several billion notification emails every day to user email addresses hosted across millions of domain names.
Are you alert enough to drive? New smartphone-linked glasses from Japan can tell you that by tracking your gaze and eye movements. Jins Meme glasses from Tokyo eyewear maker Jin can measure fatigue and concentration levels, alerting drivers to dangerous situations. They can measure eye strain caused by looking at computer monitors for a long time, as well as track activities for health purposes. The glasses can also be used to navigate smartphone displays simply by looking left or right. At first glance,
Motorola wants to convince feature phone users to make the leap to smartphones. Does the $129 Moto E offer enough to convince them to do that?
Microsoft is struggling to explain its requirement for Windows 8.1 customers to update to the latest version of the OS in order to receive bug and security patches. The confusion began last month, when Microsoft released Windows 8.1 Update and gave Windows 8.1 commercial and consumer users until May 12 to install it, saying that they otherwise wouldn’t get access to future patches. Responding to complaints from commercial customers—those who receive fixes via WSUS (Windows Server Update Services), Windows Intune or System Center Configuration Manager—Microsoft buckled and extended the deadline to August. It kept the original May 12 deadline in place for consumers, but then on Monday at the last minute moved it to June 10.
Changing the voice used for navigation on an Android phone from robotic to something more natural is easy, but buried in the menus. First hit the menu or options key on your phone and select settings. Scroll down to Accessibility. Then scroll down to Text to Speech Options. Depending on what is installed on the phone, there may be a few options listed. The phone will typically default to the manufacturer’s voice option. By tapping on the gear, users can change language settings for the default voice, but for the more natural text to speech synthesis, choose Google text to speech engine.
E3's not even for another month and already the biggest announcement might have been made: Microsoft is releasing "Beginning on June 9th, in all markets where Xbox One is sold, we will offer Xbox One starting at $399," wrote Xbox head Phil Spencer in Cue explosions. Cue cheers. Cue Microsoft finally completing the massive, unprecedented 180-degree turn on policy it started after last year's E3 disaster.
Surprise! LG is about to drop two new wearables next week, and one explores the curious "blood flow signals in the ear" model for heart rate data.
Tabbles provides a tagging overlay for the Windows file system, making it easier to group files based on their logical relationship to each other, not their location within the disk’s hierarchy. The folder/file system has been the default metaphor since the earliest days of personal computing, but with a typical drive holding hundreds of thousands of files, organizing them rationally is difficult. Depending on your needs of the moment, you may want to see all Excel sheets from the past year, or all files related to a single project, or all of the Word documents for the four projects related to a particular client. Tabbles makes it easy to do this, if you use it regularly and with discipline.
Spring is in the air, and you know what that means: Cheap PC games. While we've yet to see
Facebook’s messaging application doesn’t support encryption, but an open-source chat program, Cryptocat, has made it possible to chat with friends there over an encrypted connection. The program’s founder, Nadim Kobeissi, “Effectively, what Cryptocat is doing is benefitting from your Facebook Chat contact list as a readily available buddy list,” he wrote. The move could augment Cryptocat’s user base since new users won’t have the chore of building a new contacts list, although they would need to download Cryptocat’s browser extension or iPhone application to benefit from encryption.
Google is expanding its Knowledge Graph into Google Maps. The company has confirmed to Search Engine Land that some locations in Google Maps will now get a new “Quick Facts” info card, and that the data are from Google’s Knowledge Graph. This new feature began appearing on Monday...
Today, the Bing Ads team announced the launch of live chat support and a new industry insights portal. Live Chat will be available at all hours every day of the week for in its English-language markets. Customers can use Live Chat to ask questions about campaign set up, optimization tactics,...
The Apple-focused website 9to5Mac.com reported today that Google’s iOS Search app has been updated to version 4.0, with new voice search cues and customized alerts from Google Now. With the updates, the app’s new voice search cues offer more conversational-styled search queries....
Join us Thursday, May 15th at 1:00EDT (10:00PDT) to hear Search Engine Land’s Greg Sterling and John Lee of Clix Marketing discuss how combining search results with call tracking can be used to generate high-quality leads. Topics include: What is call tracking; Using mobile, organic, and paid...
The “right to be forgotten”: a triumph of individual privacy rights or censorship? It’s going to depend on how it plays out in specific circumstances. The Luxembourg-based European Union Court of Justice, Europe’s “top court,” ruled earlier today that Google can...
Over the past week or so, there has been a lot of various signals across the search community that Google’s algorithms and rankings were updating; so much so that people were bracing themselves for a major Penguin or Panda-like algorithm announcement from Google. Google never made the...
There are a lot of questions around link building tactics these days, especially when it comes to how companies can actually build links that won’t get them in trouble. In fact, one of the most common questions I hear at conferences and from clients is, “How do you build good...
Search for [miami heat] on Google and you may not just see information about scores, schedules, standings and so on, but you may also see a video hosted on YouTube from the NBA with a game recap. Google is now showing video thumbnails in the NBA knowledge graph. The picture above shows how the...
Yesterday, Search Engine Land featured a post about the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine now providing access to more than 440 billion archived web pages back to 1996. As I’ve written about before on Search Engine Land and my infoDOCKET blog, the Wayback Machine is an absolutely...