http://www.pcworld.com en-us Tue, 22 Oct 2013 01:53:03 -0700 Tue, 22 Oct 2013 01:53:03 -0700 In the invitation to the Nokia World event in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, Nokia promised to show "innovation reinvented," making its own attempt to generate Apple-style hype for a product that no one was really expecting in the first place. Instead, Nokia actually announced two new devices that seem as if they were torn out of the Book of Samsung: an oversized phone and a 10-inch tablet. While both devices feature 1080p screens, quad-core processors, and cameras that rival some point-and-shoots, they aren't exactly "innovative." Nokia is simply pointing its ship in the direction the wind is blowing. Windows Phone users may be disappointed when they realize they can no longer make fun of their Android-wielding friends over their large phones. With its 6-inch screen, the Lumia 1520 is only marginally bigger than the Samsung Galaxy Note III, but the 1080p display is a huge improvement over its predecessors. Microsoft's latest Windows Phone update will take advantage of the bigger screen size by enabling three rows of live tiles rather than the standard two, which you can use to highlight the most important apps for immediate thumb access. The device will also come with a 2.2GHz quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 processor, 2GB of RAM, 32GB of internal storage, and a MicroSD expansion slot, as well as a 3400mAh battery pack. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here If there's any U.S. city whose citizens are likely to use technology to alleviate a transit strike, San Francisco is it. On Monday, ride-sharing and car-hailing services, many fueled by smartphone apps, reported increased use after a strike halted America's fifth-largest light rail system, the Bay Area Rapid Transit. The strike, which is over pay, benefits and work conditions, began on Friday morning, though the full effects weren't felt until the Monday morning commute. BART is a vital commuter link between San Francisco and communities on the east side of the San Francisco Bay, including the city of Oakland. With no trains, the roads were the only alternative for many people. Sidecar, one of several services that allow riders to hail private cars via an app, said Monday was a record morning for shared rides across the Bay Bridge, which connects Oakland and San Francisco. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here What will you be doing over a mobile network in 28 years? Whatever it is, AT&T and cell-tower company Crown Castle want a piece of it. In a deal announced on Sunday, Crown Castle International will lease about 9,100 of AT&T's towers for an average term of 28 years. The agreement, under which Crown Castle will also buy about 600 AT&T towers outright, will bring AT&T about $4.85 billion in cash up front. It's expected to close by the end of this year. After Crown Castle takes over the towers, it will lease them back to AT&T, so the carrier says it doesn't expect the transaction to affect subscribers' service. But the arrangement does provide a hint of how much faith mobile companies have in the future of this still-young business. At 28 years, stretching out until 2041, the average lease term for these towers is far beyond the horizon of most predictions about mobile bandwidth, apps or devices. But the trends underlying mobile data point to new capabilities coming online for years, and full-size cell towers are likely to be critical infrastructure for decades, according to Tolaga Group analyst Phil Marshall. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here Google wants to turn business owners into cartographers with a new mapping tool designed to visualize their companies' data. On Monday, Google launched Google Maps Engine Pro, a cloud-based software tool designed to let businesses organize data such as shipping routes, warehouse locations and sales territories when just a clunky spreadsheet or a massive database won't do. It's about solving geo-related problems: Picture a company that wants to better design its shuttle routes by looking at where its employees live on a map, or an insurance company that wants to price out its premiums more quickly by seeing whether a client lives in a high-risk area. The idea is to help companies get more value out of the location-based data they already have. If that data can be plotted on a map, it will be easier for business owners to make decisions, Google executives said Monday during a media briefing at the company's offices in San Francisco. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here In the office, people still prefer Microsoft Office. Yes, despite threats from rivals that are open source, cheaper, fully cloud-based or more mobile-friendly, Microsoft Office's desktop suite reigns over the workplace productivity software kingdom. That's the conclusion Forrester Research reached after recently polling 155 enterprise IT professionals with decision-making power over their company's choice of office software suites. "Things haven't really changed," said Forrester analyst Philipp Karcher, who authored the report. "Office still has a stranglehold in this market." To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here IBM and hardware partner Libelium hope to cut through the complexities of the so-called "Internet of things" through a do-it-yourself kit allowing users to test and deploy sensor networks. The companies on Monday introduced the Waspmote Mote Runner, a computer that can collect and share data with other devices within wireless range. IBM is providing the software tools while Libelium is making the hardware, which will include sensors to collect weather, server temperature and other information. The hardware is a motherboard with sensors for gases, oxygen, carbon dioxide, temperature, motion, light, soil temperature, GPS and others. The board comes with standard interfaces including Ethernet and serial interfaces, so it can be plugged into existing hardware like smart meters or installations like solar energy plants. Waspmote Mote Runner is priced at €1550 to €2550 (US$2121 to $3489), depending on the types of sensors on the board. The product is targeted at enthusiasts and scientists looking to deploy complex mesh networks in which sensors exchange data, IBM said. For example, geologists could collect data with the help of the board and meteorologists could collect weather data. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here By most accounts, Microsoft's Internet Explorer 10 is a pretty good mobile browser. But variety is the spice of life, and software developer Maxthon just added a big dash of flavor: Maxthon Cloud Browser is now available for Windows Phone. What's the big deal? Maxthon may not currently be a household name like Chrome or Firefox, but it could be soon: it was recently announced that Cloud Browser will come preloaded on over 100 million Android smartphones in 2014, thanks to a partnership with MediaTek. Its arrival on Windows Phone today isn't just another vote of confidence for the increasingly popular browser; it's a sign that more and bigger developers are supporting Microsoft's mobile operating system (which itself is experiencing slow but steady growth). Indeed, according to Karl Mattson, a Maxthon VP, "Windows Phone is gaining prominence worldwide, and its users deserve a browser that better serves their wants and needs." What kinds of wants and needs? Cloud Browser's key claims to fame include cross-platform support and automated favorites syncing, meaning users can sync their bookmarks across multiple devices; all courtesy of a free Maxthon Passport account. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here The European Parliament's civil liberties committee voted Monday night to allow profiling of "pseudonymous" data, but digital rights groups say that safeguards to protect data are not sufficient. The committee vote was on the latest amendments to the proposed E.U. Data Protection Regulation, which was put forward by Justice Commissioner Viviane Reding in 2012 and has provoked some of the heaviest lobbying seen in Brussels in years. The text voted on Monday had been through almost 4,000 amendments. "The combination of Articles 6 and 20 amounts to a badly drafted license to profile without consent," warned EDRi director Joe McNamee. Article 20 of the draft law states: "Profiling based solely on the processing of pseudonymous data should be presumed not to significantly affect the interests, rights or freedoms of the data subject." Pseudonymous data is defined in the text as "personal data that cannot be attributed to a specific data subject without the use of additional information." To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here Yahoo, in its crusade to reinvent itself, is adding another item to the agenda: revamping its small-business Web hosting unit. Yahoo Small Business handles Web hosting, domain registration, e-commerce and email services for small businesses. The company is looking to hire a visual designer as part of a larger plan to "reinvent the core user and visual experience" for the division, Yahoo said in a job posting that was published to its site last Friday. The designer will work with a team of other designers, product managers, marketers and engineers "to create a whole new experience that helps small business owners start, build and grow their businesses," Yahoo said. The plan appears to encompass a range of devices across desktop and mobile. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here The mobile workforce faces a challenge. Smartphones and tablets work fine for most business purposes, but handheld devices with tiny microphones and speakers are not ideal for audio and video conferencing. Logitech is seeking to remedy that with the new P710e mobile speakerphone. Logitech designed the P710e to enable mobile workers to engage in audio and video conference sessions as if they were sitting at their office desk or in the conference room. The speakerphone provides hands-free operation with optimal positioning for a mobile device, so the display is at a good viewing angle and the forward-facing camera is focused on your face. The P710e microphone is equipped with both acoustic echo cancelation and noise-canceling technologies, and it uses digital signal processing and wideband technologies to enhance audio quality. It's Skype certified, Cisco compatible, and optimized for Microsoft Lync. The speakerphone lasts for up to 15 hours on a single charge and connects to your smartphone and/or tablet via USB, Bluetooth, or NFC. It can pair with up to eight Bluetooth devices so you don't have to jump through hoops to connect it with different devices as your needs change. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here If you routinely receive emails loaded with attachments you know what a pain it is to open and review them all separately. Now there's a better way to share content with prospects, customers or other business contacts: by emailing your audience a link to a beautiful online presentation. PointDrive is a new Web app that lets you bring together documents, images, links, videos and maps in one place, resulting in a streamlined presentation that a recipient can peruse in a glance, comment on, and share with others. While this may sound like a lot more work than attaching files to an email, the presentation creation process in PointDrive is remarkably simple. Unlike the many Web apps that let you register using Facebook or Google credentials, PointDrive lets you use LinkedIn. Doing so pulls in your data from the professional network and populates a presentation with things like your company information, title, and contact details. You can upload files from your computer or Dropbox, link to any URL, include video from YouTube or Vimeo, and type in an address to include a Google Map. And for every entry or asset you include in the presentation PointDrive shows you a preview of the content and lets you include commentary alongside it. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here More than a half million U.S. residents have signed up for health insurance under the Affordable Care Act despite ongoing problems with HealthCare.gov, one of the main ways to shop for the new health plans, U.S. President Barack Obama said Monday. There is "no excuse" for the problems that have plagued HealthCare.gov since the site went live Oct. 1, Obama added during a speech. He promised the problems with the website being slow and users being unable to complete their applications would be fixed, with the administration bringing in some of the "best IT talent" in the U.S. as part of a so-called tech surge announced Sunday. "Nobody's madder than me about the fact that the website isn't working as well as it should, which means it's gonna get fixed," Obama said. "Everybody who wants insurance through the marketplace will get insurance. Period." Obama's speech came as The New York Times, quoting anonymous contractors working on the website, said it may take weeks before HealthCare.gov is working properly. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here Amid news reports of groups paying users to write Wikipedia entries, the online encyclopedia has blocked or banned more than 250 accounts, the site announced Monday. A number of user accounts, "perhaps as many as several hundred," may have been paid to write Wikipedia articles promoting groups or products, Sue Gardner, executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation, said in a blog post. Wikipedia editors continue to investigate allegations of suspicious edits and so-called sockpuppetry, the practice of using online identities for purposes of deception, she wrote. Editing for pay has been a "divisive topic" at Wikipedia for years, Gardner said. "Unlike a university professor editing Wikipedia articles in their area of expertise, paid editing for promotional purposes, or paid advocacy editing as we call it, is extremely problematic," she added. "We consider it a 'black hat' practice. Paid advocacy editing violates the core principles that have made Wikipedia so valuable for so many people." To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here To prevent disruptions and scale up its service while keeping costs down, Twitter has had to drastically change its core infrastructure, taking up open source tools while doing so. Twitter processes about 6,000 messages a second, adding up to more than 500 million messages per day or about 3.5 billion a week. And at one peak time, Twitter handled a record 143,000 messages in one second during the airing of the movie "Castle in the Sky" in Japan earlier this year, said Chris Aniszczyk, head of open source computing at Twitter during LinuxCon Europe in Edinburgh on Monday. Handling this number of messages has been challenging for the company, Aniszczyk said. Twitter started out in 2006 using a monolithic Ruby on Rails application rather than a distributed platform. That worked out fine back then because the service wasn't that busy, but the setup led to growing pains in 2008 when a lot fail whales—the term Twitter uses to describe service disruptions—started happening. Twitter's engineers were able to keep up by basically applying Band-Aids, Aniszczyk said. Things got really problematic though during the 2010 football World Cup, which was kind of a low point as well as a high point for Twitter. While some 3,000 messages per second were sent, it was hard to deal with the number of messages. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here I've resigned myself to the fact that some questions just don't have answers. For example, who built the pyramids? What really happened to Amelia Earhart? And why did Microsoft disable the Libraries feature in Windows 8.1? You remember Libraries: It was one of the most highly touted (and useful) additions to Windows 7, a way to find and sort files without having to navigate across a zillion far-flung folders. Unsurprisingly, the feature carried over to Windows 8. Surprisingly, it vanished in Windows 8.1. The only explanation I can conceive is that... actually, no, I can't conceive of any explanation. Did Libraries generate too many tech-support calls? Did research show that not many people used it? Again, I'm stumped, but I do think it's yet another slap-users-in-the-face change that makes absolutely no sense. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here If Cisco thought it was unloading a consumer brand that no longer fit with its enterprise focus by selling its Linksys business unit to Belkin, Cisco's in for a surprise: Belkin is embarking on an ambitious campaign to once again make Linksys a major player in the SMB networking market. "Linksys had been successfully selling SMB infrastructure products into the marketplace for more than 20 years," said Ben Thacker, global vice president of Belkin enterprise business. "Linksys was one of the largest suppliers of switches and routers into the 5- to 99-seat environment. Now under the Belkin International organization we know the Linksys brand can be successful again catering to this environment." Indeed, Linksys had significant shares of both the consumer and SMB markets when Cisco acquired it in 2003. But Cisco rebadged Linksys's business-oriented hardware as Cisco products and used the Linksys brand solely for consumer devices. A source inside Linksys, however, tells me that many of the Linksys business-unit engineers remained and came over to Belkin as part of the acquisition. Belkin, meanwhile, is best known as a consumer-electronics manufacturer, selling cables, smartphone and tablet cases, outlet strips, webcams, and simple home-automation devices. But dig a little deeper and you'll find that Belkin has a robust line of business-oriented products, too, ranging from KVM (keyboard, video, mouse) hardware for controlling rack-mounted servers to the hulking racks those servers are mounted into. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here Pritesh Singh asked whether anyone other than the intended recipient can view files attached to a Gmail message. Unless you take special precautions, nothing you send by email is secure. That's doubly true with Gmail, since Google uses the content of your messages to target advertising. I very much doubt that Google employees are reading your mail; there are cheaper ways to get the job done. But the potential of abuse is always there. And let's not forget the NSA's enthusiasm for sticking its nose into everything we do online. [Email your tech questions to answer@pcworld.com.] To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here After years of rumors, LG Electronics may soon announce a number of Chrome OS devices. The Korea-based company recently snapped up several U.S. trademarks with the term "Chrome" in them including ChromeOne, ChromeDesk, and ChromeStation. All three marks are still pending and were filed with the United States Patent and Trademark Office on October 15. All three are also earmarked for trademarks related to laptops, computers, and, or, tablets. There's no hint of what these devices might be, but it sounds like LG might use the ChromeOne name for a consumer device. ChromeDesk and ChromeStation, however, sound very desktop PC-like and could be part of an enterprise play to offer Chrome OS-based work stations or public terminals. That's purely speculation, however. LG isn't just going after these trademarks in the U.S. either. The Australian blog TMWatchsays LG has applied for the same trademarks in the land down under. Most likely, the company is applying for these Chrome-related marks in multiple countries. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here In what could turn out to be its last big event before Microsoft takes over, Nokia Tuesday is expected to add large-screen smartphones and a tablet to its Lumia family as well as upgrade its portfolio of low-cost smartphones. In less than a month, Nokia shareholders will vote on Microsoft's offer to buy the company's device business. But for now, the two companies are just close partners that continue to try to increase Windows Phone sales and, with the rumored launch of the Lumia 2520 tablet, turn around Windows RT's fortunes. Company official declined to comment on the rumors, but reports of a Nokia tablet based on Windows RT have been floating around for some time. "The bottom line is the challenges with Windows RT remain, especially related to the ecosystem around the OS. That's not going to go away tomorrow," said Roberta Cozza, research director at Gartner. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here Microsoft has released a fix for Surface RT users whose tablets croaked after updating to Windows RT 8.1. Over the weekend, Microsoft pulled the Windows RT 8.1 update from the Windows Store, citing "a situation affecting a limited number of users." The update was causing boot configuration errors, which led some users to see a blue screen of death (with startup error 0xc000000d) on startup. [Now read: Windows 8.1 launch weekend plagued by some show-stopping installation issues] If you have a bricked Surface RT, download the recovery images from Microsoft's Website onto another PC. To create the recovery drive, you'll also need a USB drive with at least 4 GB of storage. The download includes a PDF file with step-by-step instructions for recovering the Surface RT. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here Fresh off Mexico's condemnation of NSA snooping, French foreign minister Laurent Fabius has summoned the U.S. ambassador to explain allegations that the U.S. National Security Agency spied on French telecommunications giant Alcatel-Lucent and gathered data on millions of phone calls. Fabius, intercepted outside a meeting of the European Union Foreign Affairs Council in Luxembourg, told journalists that he immediately summoned the U.S. ambassador to the Foreign Ministry upon reading the news in French newspaper Le Monde. Documents obtained by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden show that in a period of just 30 days, the NSA recorded data relating to 70.3 million phone calls involving French citizens using a process called Dialed Number Recognition on equipment based in France, the newspaper reported. This equipment can be used to trigger the automatic recording of calls to certain numbers, and also to identify SMS messages of interest by keyword, the newspaper said. French carrier networking vendor Alcatel-Lucent and a service operated by Orange, a French carrier, were also the subject of special attention from the NSA, according to other documents obtained by Snowden and seen by the newspaper. In addition to monitoring the communications and websites of companies such as Google and Facebook, the NSA's Prism program also monitored the domains alcatel-lucent.fr and wanadoo.fr, the newspaper said. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here The march towards One Microsoft continues: Dell's webpage for Microsoft's Xbox One console suggests that it can run and sync data from Windows 8 modern UI apps. "With all your favorite Windows 8 apps able to be run on and synced to your Xbox One, now your phone, desktop, tablet and TV can all give you a unified web and entertainment experience," a promotional page on Dell's site reads. The only problem: Microsoft hasn't said anything about the Windows Store coming to the Xbox One. More to the point, previous reports have said that while the Xbox One has some underpinnings from Windows, they aren't perfectly cross compatible. In other words, developers would need to tweak their Windows 8 apps to run on the Xbox One as far as we know. So while tantalizing, it's not very practical to surprise everyone on Xbox launch day with an announcement like this—unless, of course, Microsoft has lined up some mainstream apps to be Xbox One-ready for the console's November 22 launch. Assuming Dell hasn't let the cat out of the bag— we've dropped a line to Dell and will update this post should the company respond—the company could simply be under a misunderstanding about what the Xbox One can do. Given Microsoft's close relationship with Dell, however, that seems unlikely. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here The Mexican government has condemned newly reported spying activities of the U.S. National Security Agency against the country's former president while he was in office. A special division of the U.S. National Security Agency called "Tailored Access Operations" (TAO) hacked into an email server used by the Mexican presidency in 2010 and accessed the email account of Felipe Calderon, Mexico's president at the time, German news magazine Der Spiegel reported Sunday. The information comes from a May 2010 NSA report classified as "top secret" that was leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. "TAO successfully exploited a key mail server in the Mexican Presidencia domain within the Mexican Presidential network to gain first-ever access to President Felipe Calderon's public email account," the report said, according to Der Spiegel. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here Windows 8.1 officially landed last Thursday, bringing a scad of new features and much-needed interface improvements to Microsoft's Live Tiled vision of the future—at least if you were able to get it. While the update's going down without a hitch for the vast majority of people, many would-be upgraders are running into errors that are slamming the brakes on their Windows 8.1 aspirations. Lumia 1520: Who needs pockets?
Photo: Zach Miners
Documents obtained by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden show that in a period of just 30 days, the NSA recorded data relating to 70.3 million phone calls involving French citizens.
Here are some of the most common show-stopping errors that people have run into over Windows 8.1's launch weekend. Some have fixes. Some do not.
To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
]]> http://www.pcworld.com/article/2056292/windows-8-1-launch-weekend-plagued-by-some-show-stopping-installation-issues.html#tk.rss_all Mon, 21 Oct 2013 06:34:00 -0700 Brad Chacos The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is boosting the IT trauma team giving urgent care to the Obamacare website, which has badly malfunctioned since its launch almost three weeks ago. The embattled agency said on Sunday that it is working around the clock and calling in an A-Team of IT experts as it scrambles to cure the ills plaguing HealthCare.gov. "Our team is bringing in some of the best and brightest from both inside and outside government to scrub in with the [HHS] team and help improve HealthCare.gov," the blog post reads. "We're also putting in place tools and processes to aggressively monitor and identify parts of HealthCare.gov where individuals are encountering errors or having difficulty using the site, so we can prioritize and fix them." Other emergency measures being taken as part of what HHS calls a "tech surge" include defining new test processes to prevent new problems and regularly patching bugs during off-peak hours. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
http://www.pcworld.com en-us Tue, 22 Oct 2013 01:53:03 -0700 Tue, 22 Oct 2013 01:53:03 -0700 In the invitation to the Nokia World event in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, Nokia promised to show "innovation reinvented," making its own attempt to generate Apple-style hype for a product that no one was really expecting in the first place. Instead, Nokia actually announced two new devices that seem as if they were torn out of the Book of Samsung: an oversized phone and a 10-inch tablet. While both devices feature 1080p screens, quad-core processors, and cameras that rival some point-and-shoots, they aren't exactly "innovative." Nokia is simply pointing its ship in the direction the wind is blowing. Windows Phone users may be disappointed when they realize they can no longer make fun of their Android-wielding friends over their large phones. With its 6-inch screen, the Lumia 1520 is only marginally bigger than the Samsung Galaxy Note III, but the 1080p display is a huge improvement over its predecessors. Microsoft's latest Windows Phone update will take advantage of the bigger screen size by enabling three rows of live tiles rather than the standard two, which you can use to highlight the most important apps for immediate thumb access. The device will also come with a 2.2GHz quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 processor, 2GB of RAM, 32GB of internal storage, and a MicroSD expansion slot, as well as a 3400mAh battery pack. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here If there's any U.S. city whose citizens are likely to use technology to alleviate a transit strike, San Francisco is it. On Monday, ride-sharing and car-hailing services, many fueled by smartphone apps, reported increased use after a strike halted America's fifth-largest light rail system, the Bay Area Rapid Transit. The strike, which is over pay, benefits and work conditions, began on Friday morning, though the full effects weren't felt until the Monday morning commute. BART is a vital commuter link between San Francisco and communities on the east side of the San Francisco Bay, including the city of Oakland. With no trains, the roads were the only alternative for many people. Sidecar, one of several services that allow riders to hail private cars via an app, said Monday was a record morning for shared rides across the Bay Bridge, which connects Oakland and San Francisco. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here What will you be doing over a mobile network in 28 years? Whatever it is, AT&T and cell-tower company Crown Castle want a piece of it. In a deal announced on Sunday, Crown Castle International will lease about 9,100 of AT&T's towers for an average term of 28 years. The agreement, under which Crown Castle will also buy about 600 AT&T towers outright, will bring AT&T about $4.85 billion in cash up front. It's expected to close by the end of this year. After Crown Castle takes over the towers, it will lease them back to AT&T, so the carrier says it doesn't expect the transaction to affect subscribers' service. But the arrangement does provide a hint of how much faith mobile companies have in the future of this still-young business. At 28 years, stretching out until 2041, the average lease term for these towers is far beyond the horizon of most predictions about mobile bandwidth, apps or devices. But the trends underlying mobile data point to new capabilities coming online for years, and full-size cell towers are likely to be critical infrastructure for decades, according to Tolaga Group analyst Phil Marshall. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here Google wants to turn business owners into cartographers with a new mapping tool designed to visualize their companies' data. On Monday, Google launched Google Maps Engine Pro, a cloud-based software tool designed to let businesses organize data such as shipping routes, warehouse locations and sales territories when just a clunky spreadsheet or a massive database won't do. It's about solving geo-related problems: Picture a company that wants to better design its shuttle routes by looking at where its employees live on a map, or an insurance company that wants to price out its premiums more quickly by seeing whether a client lives in a high-risk area. The idea is to help companies get more value out of the location-based data they already have. If that data can be plotted on a map, it will be easier for business owners to make decisions, Google executives said Monday during a media briefing at the company's offices in San Francisco. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here In the office, people still prefer Microsoft Office. Yes, despite threats from rivals that are open source, cheaper, fully cloud-based or more mobile-friendly, Microsoft Office's desktop suite reigns over the workplace productivity software kingdom. That's the conclusion Forrester Research reached after recently polling 155 enterprise IT professionals with decision-making power over their company's choice of office software suites. "Things haven't really changed," said Forrester analyst Philipp Karcher, who authored the report. "Office still has a stranglehold in this market." To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here IBM and hardware partner Libelium hope to cut through the complexities of the so-called "Internet of things" through a do-it-yourself kit allowing users to test and deploy sensor networks. The companies on Monday introduced the Waspmote Mote Runner, a computer that can collect and share data with other devices within wireless range. IBM is providing the software tools while Libelium is making the hardware, which will include sensors to collect weather, server temperature and other information. The hardware is a motherboard with sensors for gases, oxygen, carbon dioxide, temperature, motion, light, soil temperature, GPS and others. The board comes with standard interfaces including Ethernet and serial interfaces, so it can be plugged into existing hardware like smart meters or installations like solar energy plants. Waspmote Mote Runner is priced at €1550 to €2550 (US$2121 to $3489), depending on the types of sensors on the board. The product is targeted at enthusiasts and scientists looking to deploy complex mesh networks in which sensors exchange data, IBM said. For example, geologists could collect data with the help of the board and meteorologists could collect weather data. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here By most accounts, Microsoft's Internet Explorer 10 is a pretty good mobile browser. But variety is the spice of life, and software developer Maxthon just added a big dash of flavor: Maxthon Cloud Browser is now available for Windows Phone. What's the big deal? Maxthon may not currently be a household name like Chrome or Firefox, but it could be soon: it was recently announced that Cloud Browser will come preloaded on over 100 million Android smartphones in 2014, thanks to a partnership with MediaTek. Its arrival on Windows Phone today isn't just another vote of confidence for the increasingly popular browser; it's a sign that more and bigger developers are supporting Microsoft's mobile operating system (which itself is experiencing slow but steady growth). Indeed, according to Karl Mattson, a Maxthon VP, "Windows Phone is gaining prominence worldwide, and its users deserve a browser that better serves their wants and needs." What kinds of wants and needs? Cloud Browser's key claims to fame include cross-platform support and automated favorites syncing, meaning users can sync their bookmarks across multiple devices; all courtesy of a free Maxthon Passport account. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here The European Parliament's civil liberties committee voted Monday night to allow profiling of "pseudonymous" data, but digital rights groups say that safeguards to protect data are not sufficient. The committee vote was on the latest amendments to the proposed E.U. Data Protection Regulation, which was put forward by Justice Commissioner Viviane Reding in 2012 and has provoked some of the heaviest lobbying seen in Brussels in years. The text voted on Monday had been through almost 4,000 amendments. "The combination of Articles 6 and 20 amounts to a badly drafted license to profile without consent," warned EDRi director Joe McNamee. Article 20 of the draft law states: "Profiling based solely on the processing of pseudonymous data should be presumed not to significantly affect the interests, rights or freedoms of the data subject." Pseudonymous data is defined in the text as "personal data that cannot be attributed to a specific data subject without the use of additional information." To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here Yahoo, in its crusade to reinvent itself, is adding another item to the agenda: revamping its small-business Web hosting unit. Yahoo Small Business handles Web hosting, domain registration, e-commerce and email services for small businesses. The company is looking to hire a visual designer as part of a larger plan to "reinvent the core user and visual experience" for the division, Yahoo said in a job posting that was published to its site last Friday. The designer will work with a team of other designers, product managers, marketers and engineers "to create a whole new experience that helps small business owners start, build and grow their businesses," Yahoo said. The plan appears to encompass a range of devices across desktop and mobile. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here The mobile workforce faces a challenge. Smartphones and tablets work fine for most business purposes, but handheld devices with tiny microphones and speakers are not ideal for audio and video conferencing. Logitech is seeking to remedy that with the new P710e mobile speakerphone. Logitech designed the P710e to enable mobile workers to engage in audio and video conference sessions as if they were sitting at their office desk or in the conference room. The speakerphone provides hands-free operation with optimal positioning for a mobile device, so the display is at a good viewing angle and the forward-facing camera is focused on your face. The P710e microphone is equipped with both acoustic echo cancelation and noise-canceling technologies, and it uses digital signal processing and wideband technologies to enhance audio quality. It's Skype certified, Cisco compatible, and optimized for Microsoft Lync. The speakerphone lasts for up to 15 hours on a single charge and connects to your smartphone and/or tablet via USB, Bluetooth, or NFC. It can pair with up to eight Bluetooth devices so you don't have to jump through hoops to connect it with different devices as your needs change. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here If you routinely receive emails loaded with attachments you know what a pain it is to open and review them all separately. Now there's a better way to share content with prospects, customers or other business contacts: by emailing your audience a link to a beautiful online presentation. PointDrive is a new Web app that lets you bring together documents, images, links, videos and maps in one place, resulting in a streamlined presentation that a recipient can peruse in a glance, comment on, and share with others. While this may sound like a lot more work than attaching files to an email, the presentation creation process in PointDrive is remarkably simple. Unlike the many Web apps that let you register using Facebook or Google credentials, PointDrive lets you use LinkedIn. Doing so pulls in your data from the professional network and populates a presentation with things like your company information, title, and contact details. You can upload files from your computer or Dropbox, link to any URL, include video from YouTube or Vimeo, and type in an address to include a Google Map. And for every entry or asset you include in the presentation PointDrive shows you a preview of the content and lets you include commentary alongside it. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here More than a half million U.S. residents have signed up for health insurance under the Affordable Care Act despite ongoing problems with HealthCare.gov, one of the main ways to shop for the new health plans, U.S. President Barack Obama said Monday. There is "no excuse" for the problems that have plagued HealthCare.gov since the site went live Oct. 1, Obama added during a speech. He promised the problems with the website being slow and users being unable to complete their applications would be fixed, with the administration bringing in some of the "best IT talent" in the U.S. as part of a so-called tech surge announced Sunday. "Nobody's madder than me about the fact that the website isn't working as well as it should, which means it's gonna get fixed," Obama said. "Everybody who wants insurance through the marketplace will get insurance. Period." Obama's speech came as The New York Times, quoting anonymous contractors working on the website, said it may take weeks before HealthCare.gov is working properly. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here Amid news reports of groups paying users to write Wikipedia entries, the online encyclopedia has blocked or banned more than 250 accounts, the site announced Monday. A number of user accounts, "perhaps as many as several hundred," may have been paid to write Wikipedia articles promoting groups or products, Sue Gardner, executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation, said in a blog post. Wikipedia editors continue to investigate allegations of suspicious edits and so-called sockpuppetry, the practice of using online identities for purposes of deception, she wrote. Editing for pay has been a "divisive topic" at Wikipedia for years, Gardner said. "Unlike a university professor editing Wikipedia articles in their area of expertise, paid editing for promotional purposes, or paid advocacy editing as we call it, is extremely problematic," she added. "We consider it a 'black hat' practice. Paid advocacy editing violates the core principles that have made Wikipedia so valuable for so many people." To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here To prevent disruptions and scale up its service while keeping costs down, Twitter has had to drastically change its core infrastructure, taking up open source tools while doing so. Twitter processes about 6,000 messages a second, adding up to more than 500 million messages per day or about 3.5 billion a week. And at one peak time, Twitter handled a record 143,000 messages in one second during the airing of the movie "Castle in the Sky" in Japan earlier this year, said Chris Aniszczyk, head of open source computing at Twitter during LinuxCon Europe in Edinburgh on Monday. Handling this number of messages has been challenging for the company, Aniszczyk said. Twitter started out in 2006 using a monolithic Ruby on Rails application rather than a distributed platform. That worked out fine back then because the service wasn't that busy, but the setup led to growing pains in 2008 when a lot fail whales—the term Twitter uses to describe service disruptions—started happening. Twitter's engineers were able to keep up by basically applying Band-Aids, Aniszczyk said. Things got really problematic though during the 2010 football World Cup, which was kind of a low point as well as a high point for Twitter. While some 3,000 messages per second were sent, it was hard to deal with the number of messages. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here I've resigned myself to the fact that some questions just don't have answers. For example, who built the pyramids? What really happened to Amelia Earhart? And why did Microsoft disable the Libraries feature in Windows 8.1? You remember Libraries: It was one of the most highly touted (and useful) additions to Windows 7, a way to find and sort files without having to navigate across a zillion far-flung folders. Unsurprisingly, the feature carried over to Windows 8. Surprisingly, it vanished in Windows 8.1. The only explanation I can conceive is that... actually, no, I can't conceive of any explanation. Did Libraries generate too many tech-support calls? Did research show that not many people used it? Again, I'm stumped, but I do think it's yet another slap-users-in-the-face change that makes absolutely no sense. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here If Cisco thought it was unloading a consumer brand that no longer fit with its enterprise focus by selling its Linksys business unit to Belkin, Cisco's in for a surprise: Belkin is embarking on an ambitious campaign to once again make Linksys a major player in the SMB networking market. "Linksys had been successfully selling SMB infrastructure products into the marketplace for more than 20 years," said Ben Thacker, global vice president of Belkin enterprise business. "Linksys was one of the largest suppliers of switches and routers into the 5- to 99-seat environment. Now under the Belkin International organization we know the Linksys brand can be successful again catering to this environment." Indeed, Linksys had significant shares of both the consumer and SMB markets when Cisco acquired it in 2003. But Cisco rebadged Linksys's business-oriented hardware as Cisco products and used the Linksys brand solely for consumer devices. A source inside Linksys, however, tells me that many of the Linksys business-unit engineers remained and came over to Belkin as part of the acquisition. Belkin, meanwhile, is best known as a consumer-electronics manufacturer, selling cables, smartphone and tablet cases, outlet strips, webcams, and simple home-automation devices. But dig a little deeper and you'll find that Belkin has a robust line of business-oriented products, too, ranging from KVM (keyboard, video, mouse) hardware for controlling rack-mounted servers to the hulking racks those servers are mounted into. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here Pritesh Singh asked whether anyone other than the intended recipient can view files attached to a Gmail message. Unless you take special precautions, nothing you send by email is secure. That's doubly true with Gmail, since Google uses the content of your messages to target advertising. I very much doubt that Google employees are reading your mail; there are cheaper ways to get the job done. But the potential of abuse is always there. And let's not forget the NSA's enthusiasm for sticking its nose into everything we do online. [Email your tech questions to answer@pcworld.com.] To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here After years of rumors, LG Electronics may soon announce a number of Chrome OS devices. The Korea-based company recently snapped up several U.S. trademarks with the term "Chrome" in them including ChromeOne, ChromeDesk, and ChromeStation. All three marks are still pending and were filed with the United States Patent and Trademark Office on October 15. All three are also earmarked for trademarks related to laptops, computers, and, or, tablets. There's no hint of what these devices might be, but it sounds like LG might use the ChromeOne name for a consumer device. ChromeDesk and ChromeStation, however, sound very desktop PC-like and could be part of an enterprise play to offer Chrome OS-based work stations or public terminals. That's purely speculation, however. LG isn't just going after these trademarks in the U.S. either. The Australian blog TMWatchsays LG has applied for the same trademarks in the land down under. Most likely, the company is applying for these Chrome-related marks in multiple countries. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here In what could turn out to be its last big event before Microsoft takes over, Nokia Tuesday is expected to add large-screen smartphones and a tablet to its Lumia family as well as upgrade its portfolio of low-cost smartphones. In less than a month, Nokia shareholders will vote on Microsoft's offer to buy the company's device business. But for now, the two companies are just close partners that continue to try to increase Windows Phone sales and, with the rumored launch of the Lumia 2520 tablet, turn around Windows RT's fortunes. Company official declined to comment on the rumors, but reports of a Nokia tablet based on Windows RT have been floating around for some time. "The bottom line is the challenges with Windows RT remain, especially related to the ecosystem around the OS. That's not going to go away tomorrow," said Roberta Cozza, research director at Gartner. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here Microsoft has released a fix for Surface RT users whose tablets croaked after updating to Windows RT 8.1. Over the weekend, Microsoft pulled the Windows RT 8.1 update from the Windows Store, citing "a situation affecting a limited number of users." The update was causing boot configuration errors, which led some users to see a blue screen of death (with startup error 0xc000000d) on startup. [Now read: Windows 8.1 launch weekend plagued by some show-stopping installation issues] If you have a bricked Surface RT, download the recovery images from Microsoft's Website onto another PC. To create the recovery drive, you'll also need a USB drive with at least 4 GB of storage. The download includes a PDF file with step-by-step instructions for recovering the Surface RT. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here Fresh off Mexico's condemnation of NSA snooping, French foreign minister Laurent Fabius has summoned the U.S. ambassador to explain allegations that the U.S. National Security Agency spied on French telecommunications giant Alcatel-Lucent and gathered data on millions of phone calls. Fabius, intercepted outside a meeting of the European Union Foreign Affairs Council in Luxembourg, told journalists that he immediately summoned the U.S. ambassador to the Foreign Ministry upon reading the news in French newspaper Le Monde. Documents obtained by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden show that in a period of just 30 days, the NSA recorded data relating to 70.3 million phone calls involving French citizens using a process called Dialed Number Recognition on equipment based in France, the newspaper reported. This equipment can be used to trigger the automatic recording of calls to certain numbers, and also to identify SMS messages of interest by keyword, the newspaper said. French carrier networking vendor Alcatel-Lucent and a service operated by Orange, a French carrier, were also the subject of special attention from the NSA, according to other documents obtained by Snowden and seen by the newspaper. In addition to monitoring the communications and websites of companies such as Google and Facebook, the NSA's Prism program also monitored the domains alcatel-lucent.fr and wanadoo.fr, the newspaper said. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here The march towards One Microsoft continues: Dell's webpage for Microsoft's Xbox One console suggests that it can run and sync data from Windows 8 modern UI apps. "With all your favorite Windows 8 apps able to be run on and synced to your Xbox One, now your phone, desktop, tablet and TV can all give you a unified web and entertainment experience," a promotional page on Dell's site reads. The only problem: Microsoft hasn't said anything about the Windows Store coming to the Xbox One. More to the point, previous reports have said that while the Xbox One has some underpinnings from Windows, they aren't perfectly cross compatible. In other words, developers would need to tweak their Windows 8 apps to run on the Xbox One as far as we know. So while tantalizing, it's not very practical to surprise everyone on Xbox launch day with an announcement like this—unless, of course, Microsoft has lined up some mainstream apps to be Xbox One-ready for the console's November 22 launch. Assuming Dell hasn't let the cat out of the bag— we've dropped a line to Dell and will update this post should the company respond—the company could simply be under a misunderstanding about what the Xbox One can do. Given Microsoft's close relationship with Dell, however, that seems unlikely. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here The Mexican government has condemned newly reported spying activities of the U.S. National Security Agency against the country's former president while he was in office. A special division of the U.S. National Security Agency called "Tailored Access Operations" (TAO) hacked into an email server used by the Mexican presidency in 2010 and accessed the email account of Felipe Calderon, Mexico's president at the time, German news magazine Der Spiegel reported Sunday. The information comes from a May 2010 NSA report classified as "top secret" that was leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. "TAO successfully exploited a key mail server in the Mexican Presidencia domain within the Mexican Presidential network to gain first-ever access to President Felipe Calderon's public email account," the report said, according to Der Spiegel. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here Windows 8.1 officially landed last Thursday, bringing a scad of new features and much-needed interface improvements to Microsoft's Live Tiled vision of the future—at least if you were able to get it. While the update's going down without a hitch for the vast majority of people, many would-be upgraders are running into errors that are slamming the brakes on their Windows 8.1 aspirations. Lumia 1520: Who needs pockets?
Photo: Zach Miners
Documents obtained by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden show that in a period of just 30 days, the NSA recorded data relating to 70.3 million phone calls involving French citizens.
Here are some of the most common show-stopping errors that people have run into over Windows 8.1's launch weekend. Some have fixes. Some do not.
To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
]]> http://www.pcworld.com/article/2056292/windows-8-1-launch-weekend-plagued-by-some-show-stopping-installation-issues.html#tk.rss_all Mon, 21 Oct 2013 06:34:00 -0700 Brad Chacos The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is boosting the IT trauma team giving urgent care to the Obamacare website, which has badly malfunctioned since its launch almost three weeks ago. The embattled agency said on Sunday that it is working around the clock and calling in an A-Team of IT experts as it scrambles to cure the ills plaguing HealthCare.gov. "Our team is bringing in some of the best and brightest from both inside and outside government to scrub in with the [HHS] team and help improve HealthCare.gov," the blog post reads. "We're also putting in place tools and processes to aggressively monitor and identify parts of HealthCare.gov where individuals are encountering errors or having difficulty using the site, so we can prioritize and fix them." Other emergency measures being taken as part of what HHS calls a "tech surge" include defining new test processes to prevent new problems and regularly patching bugs during off-peak hours. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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