http://www.pcworld.com en-us Fri, 06 Sep 2013 01:59:14 -0700 Fri, 06 Sep 2013 01:59:14 -0700 Facebook has closed the notice and comments period on the proposed changes to its privacy policy, and expects to decide by next week whether it needs to further update the policy in the wake of user feedback. The proposed changes to Facebook's Data Use Policy and Statement of Rights and Responsibilities have been criticized by six privacy groups, who on Wednesday wrote to the U.S. Federal Trade Commission that the planned changes violate a 2011 settlement between Facebook and the FTC on user privacy. "We are taking the time to ensure that user comments are reviewed and taken into consideration to determine whether further updates are necessary and we expect to finalize the process in the coming week," Facebook said Thursday. Many users on Facebook have been critical of the proposed changes. "While I don't object to Facebook mining my data in order to decide which ads to serve to me, I strongly object to my photos or text content being used to create ads others will see on Facebook," a user commented on the Facebook site governance page. "There should be a setting we can use to prohibit this use, and it should be well publicized so we know how to use it." To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here Apple is investigating a supplier factory in China for alleged labor violations, after a watchdog group claimed the facility had been forcing its employees to work long hours assembling iPhones. The company has already sent a "team of experts" to look into the claims about the factory in the Chinese city of Wuxi, run by U.S.-based Jabil Circuit, the company said Friday. Jabil has also sent an audit team to the facility, and added that it was "troubled" by the allegations. On Thursday, China Labor Watch released a report, claiming that workers at the factory were logging more than 100 hours per month in overtime to build plastic cases for a budget iPhone device. The conditions at the factory appear to contradict Apple's assertion that its suppliers are capping the work week at only 60 hours, said China Labor Watch, which accused Jabil of exploiting its workers. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here Auction giant eBay wants to know how you feel about Bitcoin. An undated post on eBay's Deals blog titled "What's the Deal with Bitcoins Anyway" featured a two-minute video encapsulating many of the pros and cons of the virtual currency. Accompanying text next to the video read: "The jury's still out on whether bitcoins will become ubiquitous and stand the test of time, or whether new innovations might eventually take their place. What do you think? Are bitcoins the real deal?" To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here Facebook has laid out big plans in recent months to simplify the app development process by acquiring Parse. But the social network actually had its eye on the cloud service company for years, and at one point the two considered a different partnership. Talks between Facebook and Parse went as far back as 2011, the year the company launched, Parse CEO Ilya Sukhar told IDG News Service on Thursday. "We started talking to Facebook a long time ago," Sukhar said, when Parse was a company of just six people. Parse now has a core team of roughly 30 employees. Parse provides a cloud-based app development platform designed to make it easier for developers to build Web and mobile apps by handling the back-end side of the work. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here Microsoft is reportedly preparing a "Power Cover," a keyboard cover for the Microsoft Surface tablet with a built-in battery. Reports by both Neowin and WinSupersite claim that the Power Cover will extend the battery life of the Surface Pro by an undisclosed amount, although any additional battery life will come as a bonus. Neither site disclosed a price or a ship date, although the word seems to be that the Power Cover will be released after the Surface 2 and mimic the existing Type Cover (at top of story), not the less-expensive Touch Cover. Microsoft representatives declined to comment. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here To prevent SharePoint Online customers from feeling boxed in, Microsoft wants to improve the way they upload and store documents in the platform, Office 365's cloud collaboration server. Over the coming weeks, Microsoft will roll out a set of changes to Office 365 targeted at SharePoint Online users, including increasing from 250M bytes to 2G bytes the size of files that people can upload to their individual SkyDrive Pro repositories and to SharePoint Online team site document libraries, the company said on Thursday in a blog post. The enhancements are in response to companies' increased use of Office 365, according to the blog post's author, Mark Kashman. "Users are uploading more documents to SkyDrive Pro, teams are building numerous team sites to work with internal teams as well as with external customers and partners, and companies are establishing their corporate intranet sites," he wrote. In addition to lifting the size limit on individual uploads, Microsoft has expanded the types of files that can be uploaded by adding .exe and .dll files. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here Belkin announced the Linksys EA6900 Wi-Fi router Thursday at the IFA conference in Berlin. It's the first Linksys-branded product to come out of Belkin since the company bought the Linksys business unit from Cisco last March. As router manufacturers are wont to do, Belkin also christened the device with a more elaborate second name: The Linksys Smart Wi-Fi AC1900. Why do companies do this? You'd think they'd have a hard enough time getting consumers to remember one name for a product. Whatever you decide to call it, the latest device from Belkin is a concurrent, dual-band, 3x3 router. That means it can operate two separate networks simultaneously (one based on the new IEEE 802.11ac standard and a second based on the older IEEE 802.11n standard), and that it provides three transmit and three receive spatial streams to support physical data rates of 1.3 Gbps (for 802.11ac clients), and 600 mbps (for 802.11n clients). The fastest 802.11n routers I'm familiar with top out at 450 mbps (150 mbps per spatial stream), so Belkin is apparently using a new chip that supports 256-QAM modulation to boost that rate to 200 mbps per spatial stream. But a network client must also be capable of handling 256-QAM modulation to achieve that top speed, and that's not common on older hardware. And as is always the case with Wi-Fi, real-world data rates on both bands will likely be much lower. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here Don't even read this story: first, just scroll down to the bottom and watch Ylvis' "The Fox," the new viral video that's taken the Internet by storm. Put simply, "The Fox" is Psy's "Gangnam Style" meets Sesame Street. How can you not watch a video that begins, "Dog goes woof / Cat goes meow / Bird goes tweet" before blowing you away with the chorus, "What does the fox say?" Because, what does the fox say? I'll tell you what the fox says. Ring-ding-ding-ding-dingeringding. That's right, Animal Planet. Bet you never knew that. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here The U.S. National Security Agency has been circumventing many online encryption efforts through a combination of supercomputers, back doors built into technology products, court orders, and other efforts, according to a new report from The New York Times and ProPublica. The NSA has cracked much of the encryption that protects global commerce, banking, trade secrets, and medical records, according to the report, which cites documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. The NSA has invested billions of dollars in efforts to defeat encryption since 2000, according to the report. In addition to deploying supercomputers to crack encryption, the NSA has worked with U.S. and foreign technology companies to build entry points into their products, the report said. The agency spends more than $250 million a year on its Sigint Enabling Project, which engages the IT industry in an effort to get companies to make their commercial products "exploitable," the report said, citing documents from Snowden. The report did not name companies that have cooperated with the NSA. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here Linkett is redefining "TV advertising." The Candian company has created a digital signage solution that detects a shopper walking by a TV and lures them to stop and interact with ads by offering them content they can grab with their phone. It's an interesting idea. Mobile commerce is exploding: According to e-marketer.com, retail sales occurring on mobile devices skyrocketed 81% last year to nearly $25 billion, accounting for 11% of all U.S. retail e-commerce, and it predicts by 2016 24% of retail e-commerce will come from mobile. Yet people generally dislike mobile ads, so the question of how effective they are is a persistent one. If your business wants to do a better job of serving marketing content to smartphone users, Linkett's solution might be attractive considering TVs are becoming ubiquitous in retail. In fact, the use of televisions in retail settings has been growing year-over-year at a rate of 12 to 15 percent and is only at the beginning of "an exponential curve," says 20-year-old Douglas Lusted, CEO and co-founder of WestonExpressions, the company that created Linkett. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here The goal of getting rid of your wallet – and moving all of your financial transactions to your cell phone – just got one step closer. Venerable online banking and payments processor PayPal has overhauled its mobile app, "completely reimagining" it to make mobile payments of all kinds easier than ever. The centerpiece of the app is a big upgrade to the way in-store payments work. A new tab on the app reading "Shop" lets you find stores or restaurants nearby that accept PayPal as a form of payment. You can check in via the app, as well as pay for goods or services directly on the same screen. After the transaction is complete, your receipt is sent to you via email. The app also greatly enhances your ability as a user to manage the payments process without having to rely on a waiter or shop merchant to help you out. At quick-service establishments you can order ahead, skip the line to pay, and just grab your item and dash. All of this is built into the PayPal app, including restaurants' full menus. Of course, the PayPal system also works if you're dining or shopping at a more conventional restaurant or store. But instead of having to hand your credit card to a server or cashier, wait for them to return with a paper credit card slip to sign, then finally complete your transaction, now you can settle up whenever it suits you (including adding tips) – and, in some cases, even throw in another couple of drinks to the bill on the fly. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here It's difficult to predict how an appeals court will rule after it hears arguments Monday in Verizon Communication's challenge of the U.S. Federal Communications Commission's net-neutrality rules. Groups on both sides of the debate over the FCC's rules prohibiting broadband providers from selectively blocking or slowing traffic say they believe they have a good case at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. Reading the court's tea leaves has become as much of a case of wishful thinking as a predictive science. On one hand, the same appeals court ruled against the FCC in April 2010, when the agency tried to force Comcast to comply with an Internet policy statement after the cable broadband provider was caught slowing BitTorrent and other bandwidth-hogging applications. The court said then that the FCC lacked "any statutorily mandated responsibility" to enforce network neutrality rules. The legal situation has changed since then, however. Last December, the same appeals court ruled in favor of the FCC after Verizon Wireless had challenged the agency's authority to impose data roaming rate rules on mobile carriers. The question over the FCC's authority to impose data roaming rules is similar to the one raised by Verizon in the net neutrality case, some telecom experts said. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here The U.S. Federal Communications Commission's net neutrality regulations, also known as open Internet rules, face a hearing on Monday in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. Verizon Communications has challenged the FCC's authority to pass the rules. Here's a look back at some highlights in the long history of net neutrality-rules at the FCC. February 2004: After many months of debate about the potential for broadband providers to selectively block or slow some Internet traffic, FCC Chairman Michael Powell, a Republican, calls for four Internet freedoms encompassing net neutrality. August 2005: The FCC, while voting to end regulations requiring incumbent telecommunications carriers to share their DSL broadband connections with competitors, approves an Internet policy statement reflecting Powell's four freedoms. The policy statement, which does not have the force of regulation, says broadband users are entitled to run Web applications and services of their choice and connect their choice of legal devices to the network. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here At the start of an inquiry into American government communications surveillance programs Thursday, European parliamentarians (MEPs) were told to expect further revelations of mass spying by the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA). Prominent hacker and Internet activist Jacob Appelbaum told the European Parliament's civil liberties committee (LIBE) that more information about government spying, this time involving private home Wi-Fi, is bound to come to the attention of the public. LIBE heard from people connected with NSA leaker Edward Snowdon, including Alan Rusbridger, editor of The Guardian and Jacques Follorou, journalist for French newspaper Le Monde. The Guardian published initial revelations of NSA spying based on information from Snowden in June. Appelbaum, meanwhile, said during Thursday's hearing that other leaks about NSA programs will reveal that the agency is hacking into personal Wi-Fi networks. He said it stands to reason that when surveillance by other means cannot be done, home Wi-Fi networks will be hacked. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here A blazing inferno swept through a large fabrication facility Wednesday that is owned by Hynix, the second-most-prolific memory chip maker in the world. Production slammed to a standstill, and within mere minutes, the Web was engulfed in a blazing inferno of its own, spurred on by speculation by some of the top names in the tech world. 
http://www.pcworld.com en-us Fri, 06 Sep 2013 01:59:14 -0700 Fri, 06 Sep 2013 01:59:14 -0700 Facebook has closed the notice and comments period on the proposed changes to its privacy policy, and expects to decide by next week whether it needs to further update the policy in the wake of user feedback. The proposed changes to Facebook's Data Use Policy and Statement of Rights and Responsibilities have been criticized by six privacy groups, who on Wednesday wrote to the U.S. Federal Trade Commission that the planned changes violate a 2011 settlement between Facebook and the FTC on user privacy. "We are taking the time to ensure that user comments are reviewed and taken into consideration to determine whether further updates are necessary and we expect to finalize the process in the coming week," Facebook said Thursday. Many users on Facebook have been critical of the proposed changes. "While I don't object to Facebook mining my data in order to decide which ads to serve to me, I strongly object to my photos or text content being used to create ads others will see on Facebook," a user commented on the Facebook site governance page. "There should be a setting we can use to prohibit this use, and it should be well publicized so we know how to use it." To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here Apple is investigating a supplier factory in China for alleged labor violations, after a watchdog group claimed the facility had been forcing its employees to work long hours assembling iPhones. The company has already sent a "team of experts" to look into the claims about the factory in the Chinese city of Wuxi, run by U.S.-based Jabil Circuit, the company said Friday. Jabil has also sent an audit team to the facility, and added that it was "troubled" by the allegations. On Thursday, China Labor Watch released a report, claiming that workers at the factory were logging more than 100 hours per month in overtime to build plastic cases for a budget iPhone device. The conditions at the factory appear to contradict Apple's assertion that its suppliers are capping the work week at only 60 hours, said China Labor Watch, which accused Jabil of exploiting its workers. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here Auction giant eBay wants to know how you feel about Bitcoin. An undated post on eBay's Deals blog titled "What's the Deal with Bitcoins Anyway" featured a two-minute video encapsulating many of the pros and cons of the virtual currency. Accompanying text next to the video read: "The jury's still out on whether bitcoins will become ubiquitous and stand the test of time, or whether new innovations might eventually take their place. What do you think? Are bitcoins the real deal?" To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here Facebook has laid out big plans in recent months to simplify the app development process by acquiring Parse. But the social network actually had its eye on the cloud service company for years, and at one point the two considered a different partnership. Talks between Facebook and Parse went as far back as 2011, the year the company launched, Parse CEO Ilya Sukhar told IDG News Service on Thursday. "We started talking to Facebook a long time ago," Sukhar said, when Parse was a company of just six people. Parse now has a core team of roughly 30 employees. Parse provides a cloud-based app development platform designed to make it easier for developers to build Web and mobile apps by handling the back-end side of the work. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here Microsoft is reportedly preparing a "Power Cover," a keyboard cover for the Microsoft Surface tablet with a built-in battery. Reports by both Neowin and WinSupersite claim that the Power Cover will extend the battery life of the Surface Pro by an undisclosed amount, although any additional battery life will come as a bonus. Neither site disclosed a price or a ship date, although the word seems to be that the Power Cover will be released after the Surface 2 and mimic the existing Type Cover (at top of story), not the less-expensive Touch Cover. Microsoft representatives declined to comment. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here To prevent SharePoint Online customers from feeling boxed in, Microsoft wants to improve the way they upload and store documents in the platform, Office 365's cloud collaboration server. Over the coming weeks, Microsoft will roll out a set of changes to Office 365 targeted at SharePoint Online users, including increasing from 250M bytes to 2G bytes the size of files that people can upload to their individual SkyDrive Pro repositories and to SharePoint Online team site document libraries, the company said on Thursday in a blog post. The enhancements are in response to companies' increased use of Office 365, according to the blog post's author, Mark Kashman. "Users are uploading more documents to SkyDrive Pro, teams are building numerous team sites to work with internal teams as well as with external customers and partners, and companies are establishing their corporate intranet sites," he wrote. In addition to lifting the size limit on individual uploads, Microsoft has expanded the types of files that can be uploaded by adding .exe and .dll files. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here Belkin announced the Linksys EA6900 Wi-Fi router Thursday at the IFA conference in Berlin. It's the first Linksys-branded product to come out of Belkin since the company bought the Linksys business unit from Cisco last March. As router manufacturers are wont to do, Belkin also christened the device with a more elaborate second name: The Linksys Smart Wi-Fi AC1900. Why do companies do this? You'd think they'd have a hard enough time getting consumers to remember one name for a product. Whatever you decide to call it, the latest device from Belkin is a concurrent, dual-band, 3x3 router. That means it can operate two separate networks simultaneously (one based on the new IEEE 802.11ac standard and a second based on the older IEEE 802.11n standard), and that it provides three transmit and three receive spatial streams to support physical data rates of 1.3 Gbps (for 802.11ac clients), and 600 mbps (for 802.11n clients). The fastest 802.11n routers I'm familiar with top out at 450 mbps (150 mbps per spatial stream), so Belkin is apparently using a new chip that supports 256-QAM modulation to boost that rate to 200 mbps per spatial stream. But a network client must also be capable of handling 256-QAM modulation to achieve that top speed, and that's not common on older hardware. And as is always the case with Wi-Fi, real-world data rates on both bands will likely be much lower. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here Don't even read this story: first, just scroll down to the bottom and watch Ylvis' "The Fox," the new viral video that's taken the Internet by storm. Put simply, "The Fox" is Psy's "Gangnam Style" meets Sesame Street. How can you not watch a video that begins, "Dog goes woof / Cat goes meow / Bird goes tweet" before blowing you away with the chorus, "What does the fox say?" Because, what does the fox say? I'll tell you what the fox says. Ring-ding-ding-ding-dingeringding. That's right, Animal Planet. Bet you never knew that. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here The U.S. National Security Agency has been circumventing many online encryption efforts through a combination of supercomputers, back doors built into technology products, court orders, and other efforts, according to a new report from The New York Times and ProPublica. The NSA has cracked much of the encryption that protects global commerce, banking, trade secrets, and medical records, according to the report, which cites documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. The NSA has invested billions of dollars in efforts to defeat encryption since 2000, according to the report. In addition to deploying supercomputers to crack encryption, the NSA has worked with U.S. and foreign technology companies to build entry points into their products, the report said. The agency spends more than $250 million a year on its Sigint Enabling Project, which engages the IT industry in an effort to get companies to make their commercial products "exploitable," the report said, citing documents from Snowden. The report did not name companies that have cooperated with the NSA. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here Linkett is redefining "TV advertising." The Candian company has created a digital signage solution that detects a shopper walking by a TV and lures them to stop and interact with ads by offering them content they can grab with their phone. It's an interesting idea. Mobile commerce is exploding: According to e-marketer.com, retail sales occurring on mobile devices skyrocketed 81% last year to nearly $25 billion, accounting for 11% of all U.S. retail e-commerce, and it predicts by 2016 24% of retail e-commerce will come from mobile. Yet people generally dislike mobile ads, so the question of how effective they are is a persistent one. If your business wants to do a better job of serving marketing content to smartphone users, Linkett's solution might be attractive considering TVs are becoming ubiquitous in retail. In fact, the use of televisions in retail settings has been growing year-over-year at a rate of 12 to 15 percent and is only at the beginning of "an exponential curve," says 20-year-old Douglas Lusted, CEO and co-founder of WestonExpressions, the company that created Linkett. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here The goal of getting rid of your wallet – and moving all of your financial transactions to your cell phone – just got one step closer. Venerable online banking and payments processor PayPal has overhauled its mobile app, "completely reimagining" it to make mobile payments of all kinds easier than ever. The centerpiece of the app is a big upgrade to the way in-store payments work. A new tab on the app reading "Shop" lets you find stores or restaurants nearby that accept PayPal as a form of payment. You can check in via the app, as well as pay for goods or services directly on the same screen. After the transaction is complete, your receipt is sent to you via email. The app also greatly enhances your ability as a user to manage the payments process without having to rely on a waiter or shop merchant to help you out. At quick-service establishments you can order ahead, skip the line to pay, and just grab your item and dash. All of this is built into the PayPal app, including restaurants' full menus. Of course, the PayPal system also works if you're dining or shopping at a more conventional restaurant or store. But instead of having to hand your credit card to a server or cashier, wait for them to return with a paper credit card slip to sign, then finally complete your transaction, now you can settle up whenever it suits you (including adding tips) – and, in some cases, even throw in another couple of drinks to the bill on the fly. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here It's difficult to predict how an appeals court will rule after it hears arguments Monday in Verizon Communication's challenge of the U.S. Federal Communications Commission's net-neutrality rules. Groups on both sides of the debate over the FCC's rules prohibiting broadband providers from selectively blocking or slowing traffic say they believe they have a good case at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. Reading the court's tea leaves has become as much of a case of wishful thinking as a predictive science. On one hand, the same appeals court ruled against the FCC in April 2010, when the agency tried to force Comcast to comply with an Internet policy statement after the cable broadband provider was caught slowing BitTorrent and other bandwidth-hogging applications. The court said then that the FCC lacked "any statutorily mandated responsibility" to enforce network neutrality rules. The legal situation has changed since then, however. Last December, the same appeals court ruled in favor of the FCC after Verizon Wireless had challenged the agency's authority to impose data roaming rate rules on mobile carriers. The question over the FCC's authority to impose data roaming rules is similar to the one raised by Verizon in the net neutrality case, some telecom experts said. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here The U.S. Federal Communications Commission's net neutrality regulations, also known as open Internet rules, face a hearing on Monday in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. Verizon Communications has challenged the FCC's authority to pass the rules. Here's a look back at some highlights in the long history of net neutrality-rules at the FCC. February 2004: After many months of debate about the potential for broadband providers to selectively block or slow some Internet traffic, FCC Chairman Michael Powell, a Republican, calls for four Internet freedoms encompassing net neutrality. August 2005: The FCC, while voting to end regulations requiring incumbent telecommunications carriers to share their DSL broadband connections with competitors, approves an Internet policy statement reflecting Powell's four freedoms. The policy statement, which does not have the force of regulation, says broadband users are entitled to run Web applications and services of their choice and connect their choice of legal devices to the network. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here At the start of an inquiry into American government communications surveillance programs Thursday, European parliamentarians (MEPs) were told to expect further revelations of mass spying by the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA). Prominent hacker and Internet activist Jacob Appelbaum told the European Parliament's civil liberties committee (LIBE) that more information about government spying, this time involving private home Wi-Fi, is bound to come to the attention of the public. LIBE heard from people connected with NSA leaker Edward Snowdon, including Alan Rusbridger, editor of The Guardian and Jacques Follorou, journalist for French newspaper Le Monde. The Guardian published initial revelations of NSA spying based on information from Snowden in June. Appelbaum, meanwhile, said during Thursday's hearing that other leaks about NSA programs will reveal that the agency is hacking into personal Wi-Fi networks. He said it stands to reason that when surveillance by other means cannot be done, home Wi-Fi networks will be hacked. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here A blazing inferno swept through a large fabrication facility Wednesday that is owned by Hynix, the second-most-prolific memory chip maker in the world. Production slammed to a standstill, and within mere minutes, the Web was engulfed in a blazing inferno of its own, spurred on by speculation by some of the top names in the tech world.
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