http://www.pcworld.com en-us Tue, 06 May 2014 01:52:58 -0700 Tue, 06 May 2014 01:52:58 -0700 Mon, 05 May 2014 23:35:07 -0700 Agam Shah Agam Shah Lenovo is bringing a unique design to Chromebooks with the N20p Chromebook, which has a touchscreen that can rotate roughly 300 degrees to a "stand mode." In close proximity, the stand mode also makes the Chromebook convenient to view media content, said Robert Eckard, Lenovo's senior product manager for notebooks. The N20p Chromebook will be priced at US$329. Lenovo also announced the non-touch N20 Chromebook, which will be priced at $279. The N20p weighs 1.4 kilograms, while the N20 weighs 1.3 kilograms. Both the N20 and N20p laptops have 11.6-inch screens that can display images at a 1366 x 768-pixel resolution. The N20 and N20p are Lenovo's first Chromebooks based on the updated Chrome OS, which hit laptops in September last year. Acer, Samsung and Hewlett-Packard were the first companies to ship Chromebooks with the updated OS. Chrome OS is also being used in mini-desktops from HP, Google and Asustek, and an all-in-one PC from LG. Lenovo already sells the ThinkPad X131e, which started shipping in January 2013 and is based on the first version of Chrome OS. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here A pension and relief fund that sued IBM for failing to warn investors of loss of business in China because of its alleged involvement with spying by the U.S. National Security Agency has voluntarily withdrawn the lawsuit in a New York court. The Louisiana Sheriffs' Pension and Relief Fund has decided to voluntarily dismiss the action after additional investigation into the matters alleged, which included investigations in the U.S. and China and discussions with the defense counsel, John C. Browne, lawyer for the fund, wrote to the court in a letter disclosed Monday. "We said the complaint proceeded to make numerous specious and false accusations, and IBM called upon the law firm that filed this action to do the right thing and dismiss it. We are pleased that they have done the right thing," IBM spokesman Doug Shelton wrote in an emailed statement. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here Lenovo's new N20p, announced Monday night, might look like any other compact Chromebook—there are plenty of them, and most are unremarkable. But the N20p offers two distinctive features: First, its 11.6-inch display is a 10-point touchscreen, a display enhancement that only the Acer C270P offers in this size class. Second, the N20p borrows a trick from its Yoga cousins: Its hinge can rotate up to 300 degrees so that you can prop up the Chromebook in a standing position. That's a first for any Chromebook, and it makes the N20p one of the most interesting Chromebook models to come along since last year's high-end Pixel from Google. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here Hackers claiming to have found a critical flaw in a widely used open-source remote login software, OpenSSH, are likely bluffing, according to a developer affiliated with the project. OpenSSH is used to remotely log into Unix-based systems securely and is incorporated into a number of operating systems, routers and switches made by vendors such as IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Cisco Systems and Red Hat. On Pastebin, the hackers claim that two years ago they found a problem in OpenSSH that can allow data to be remotely accessed from a server. They claim exploiting the flaw can reveal system user hashes, keys and other random data. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here Android console maker Ouya is considering entering the Chinese market as part of its expansion into Asia. China recently ended a 14-year-old ban on foreign-made game consoles, opening the door for companies to tap the market, Ouya CEO Julie Uhrman said Monday. "When we enter a new market we want to do it the right way with the right partners," she added in an interview. The San Francisco company is best known for its US$99 Android gaming system, and last year raised over US$8.5 million on the Kickstarter crowdfunding platform. A few of those early backers came from China, Uhrman said, while attending the Global Mobile Internet Conference in Beijing. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here The Toq smartwatch isn't so much a retail-ready smartwatch as Qualcomm's vision of what a smartwatch can be. Armed with a diverse portfolio of mobile technologies, Qualcomm began releasing a limited run of Toq watches last year—mostly to show off its energy-efficient, always-on Mirasol display technology. And now Qualcomm has advanced its "living proof of concept" model further by integrating voice dictation into the Toq's text messaging feature. Powered by Nuance's voice-to-text engine, Toq users can now respond to incoming text messages by tapping on a microphone icon, and uttering brief replies. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here If you still had your hopes up for a portable Xbox gaming handheld, they just got dashed. In a series of tweets Sunday night, Xbox chief Phil Spencer came clean on some of what gamers can expect from Microsoft during the E3 timeframe this summer. But Spencer also addressed the topic of a handheld Xbox: Put simply, it's probably not going to happen. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here ]]> http://www.pcworld.com/article/2151282/microsofts-xbox-chief-shoots-down-portable-game-console.html#tk.rss_all Mon, 05 May 2014 13:07:00 -0700 Grant Gross Grant Gross The Federal Communications Commission should reclassify portions of broadband networks as regulated, common-carrier services to preserve net neutrality protections, Mozilla has said in a new petition to the agency. After a contentious debate about U.S. net neutrality rules in recent weeks, Mozilla's proposal is an effort to define a "new path" for the FCC, Mozilla senior policy engineer Chris Riley said. The browser maker proposes that the FCC create separate rules for how broadband providers manage traffic for their customers and for websites and Web-based service providers. The FCC should redefine the "remote delivery" service offered by the broadband provider to websites and Web services as a regulated service covered by traditional telephone regulations, Riley wrote in a blog post Monday. The Mozilla proposal would keep the broadband providers' relationship with customers as a lightly regulated information service, as it is today. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here The Apple-Samsung jury returned to court Monday to fix an error in its verdict form, but in doing so it declined to award Apple any additional damages. The correction it made means the trial is now over—pending appeals—and that Samsung must pay Apple $119.5 million in damages, far less than the $2.2 billion it had been seeking. The jury issued its initial verdict late Friday, finding Samsung had infringed two of the patents Apple sued over, and awarding damages for a third patent that Samsung had already been found to infringe. Samsung was cleared of infringing two other patents, and it was awarded $158,400 for Apple's infringement of one Samsung patent. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here The abrupt departure of SAP technology chief Vishal Sikka has prompted a number of questions about the vendor's strategy, particularly in regard to the Hana in-memory computing platform, and what it could mean for customers. There's also some intrigue over what sort of boardroom machinations may have prompted the high profile and widely respected technologist to suddenly leave SAP. Here's a look at both topics. SAP needs a new visionary: Sikka is being replaced by Bernd Leukert, a 20-year veteran of SAP who oversaw the porting of SAP's Business Suite ERP (enterprise resource planning) software to Hana. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here To help organizations get a better handle on the R statistical programming language, which is enjoying a surge in use as a big-data analysis tool, Revolution Analytics has introduced a new support package. "A lot of companies have put so much investment into collecting data they didn't collect before. The next step after capturing big data is to analyze it," said David Smith, Revolution Analytics' chief community officer and head of the new open source solutions group, explaining why organizations may want to take a closer look at the R language. "R is the lingua franca of data science," Smith said. The AdviseR support package cost US$795 per year, per user. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here IBM picked a good day to launch a suite of security tools and services: a Monday morning when many CEOs saw in their news roundup that retailer Target is newly rid of a CEO who presided over a catastrophic data breach. The new IBM Threat Protection System product suite and the Critical Data Protection Program set of IT services are aimed at enterprises that want to protect themselves against data theft. The business consequences of poor enterprise security are growing ever larger, as cybercriminals get more ambitious: last year's intrusion into point-of-sale systems at Target led to the theft of 40 million credit cards and personal data on 70 million people. While the company's CIO was replaced earlier, the chairman and CEO Gregg Steinhafel is now stepping down as well, the retailer announced. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here EMC is taking on Amazon's cloud storage service with a private cloud platform it says will cost less to use. The Elastic Cloud Storage Appliance, launching on Monday at EMC World and delivered by the end of June, is a hyperscale storage system for enterprises to deploy in their own facilities. EMC previewed it last year under the code name Project Nile. The ECS Appliance is part of a wider move into cloud and so-called software-defined storage by EMC, which is looking beyond traditional storage even as the company and most of its customers continue to rely on dedicated hardware platforms. Also on Monday, EMC is introducing ViPR 2.0, an update to its storage virtualization and management software, while rolling out a data-protection appliance for midsize customers under the Data Domain line. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here EMC has agreed to acquire DSSD, a Silicon Valley startup developing technology for pooling server-based flash for high-performance data access. The company will help EMC tackle challenges in making flash capacity on servers into shared storage capacity. Its chairman is Andy Bechtolsheim, a pioneer of networked computing from Sun Microsystems and numerous startups. Its CEO, former 3Par executive Bill Moore, will continue to run the DSSD business inside EMC while Bechtolsheim remains a strategic advisor. Server-based flash offers rapid access to data because it's connected to servers via fast PCIe connections. But it's limited to 10TB or less on each server and is hard to manage, forcing companies to rewrite applications just to use it, said Jeremy Burton, EMC's president of products and marketing, who announced the acquisition at EMC World in Las Vegas. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here Web users and developers should take new steps to avoid surveillance by the U.S. National Security Agency and other spy organizations, a group of privacy and digital rights advocates said Monday. The 30-plus groups, including Fight for the Future, Demand Progress, Reddit, Free Press and the Libertarian Party, have set June 5 as the day to "reset the 'Net" by deploying new privacy tools. June 5 is the anniversary of the first news stories about NSA surveillance based on leaks by former agency contractor Edward Snowden. Governments are building a "prison" around the Internet, the groups said in a video. "But government spies have a weakness," the video said. "They can hack anybody, but they can't hack everybody. Folks like the NSA depend on collecting insecure data from tapped fiber. They depend on our mistakes—mistakes we can fix." To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here AMD took another step ahead toward what it calls "ambidextrous computing" on Monday, announcing a framework for bringing together ARM processors with its own X86 chips in what it calls "Project Skybridge". From a technical standpoint, Project SkyBridge combines the world's two most popular processor architectures: X86, a high-performance chip architcture which dominates the PC, server, and notebook space, and ARM, the low-power, de facto chip architecture for tablets and smartphones. SkyBridge chips, whether they be based on ARM or X86, will be pin-compatible, meaning that they will be able to be used on the same motherboard with minimal changes, if any. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here Antivirus is dead. So sayeth Brian Dye, Symantec's senior vice president for information security, in a weekend interview with The Wall Street Journal. The words sound shocking—Symantec and its Norton antivirus suite have been at the forefront of PC security for years and years. But don't let the stark claim fool you: Norton isn't being retired, and Dye's words merely reflect the new reality in computing protection. While detecting and protecting against malicious software installed on your computer still plays a very vital role, many of the sophisticated attacks of today still manage to penetrate PCs with antivirus programs installed. In fact, Dye told WSJ that he estimates traditional antivirus detects a mere 45 percent of all attacks. That's not good. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here John McAfee thinks the world could use one more messaging app. The former anti-virus software creator and international fugitive is promoting a new app called Chadder, which claims to keep messages secure through key server encryption. The app is available now for Android and Windows Phone, and an iOS version is coming soon. However, the app appears to be in extremely rough shape, not even deserving the "beta" tag that the developers use in their description. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here Google has an interesting idea for upcoming versions of Chrome that could either make browsing safer or destroy the web as we know it. The latest build of Canary, Google's experimental version of the Chrome browser, introduced a feature that does away with URLs, also known as web addresses. The new feature, called the Origin Chip, wasn't enabled by default in my tests. But you can turn it on by enabling the Chrome flag "chrome://flags/#origin-chip-in-omnibox" and setting it to enabled. Although this is very much an experimental feature, you can also enable the Origin Chip in the stable build of Chrome. Above: Canary's Origin Chip. Below: The stable version of Google Chrome. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here [This is a sponsored article written by IDG Creative Lab, a partner of PCWorld, and not by PCWorld's editorial staff.] We've put our whole lives into our computers, tablets, smartphones, and everything else we attach to the Internet. We've got our work mixed in with our private lives, old projects mixed in with new, and music on one device that we want to play on another. All this technology is supposed to make our lives easier, but all too often, it's just plain inconvenient. Here are a few tips and tricks to put your digital world in order, and make your life easier for real. You're working on a complex report. You've got spreadsheets, documents, photos, and so on. Do the photos belong in My Pictures? Of course not. Keep all of the files for a single project in a single folder. Better yet, put two folders in My Documents: Work and Home, and put your project folders in there. And reserve My Pictures for family and personal photos. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here Virtual reality headset maker OculusVR recently came under attack from game development company Zenimax Media, and now Oculus is hitting back. On Thursday, Zenimax accused Oculus of stealing core technology that made the Oculus Rift headset a reality. But on Monday Oculus responded saying the charges are nonsense. "We are disappointed but not surprised by Zenimax's actions and we will prove that all of its claims are false," Oculus VR said in a statement via e-mail. Oculus also said "there is not a line of Zenimax code or any of its technology in any Oculus products." To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here While games from other publishers pop up on Origin here and there, much of EA's PC gaming platform is dedicated to selling titles made by EA itself—and one soon-to-expire promotion will get you the full version of one of the hottest games of yesteryear for free. Until May 8, EA's offering the highly regarded space horror game Dead Space for the low, low price of absolutely nothing on Origin. The game still holds up well despite being nearly six years old; we named it to our list of the most terrifying PC games around just last year. What's more, Dead Space still sells online for $20, so this is a pretty enticing deal for folks who haven't stepped into Isaac Clarke's shoes to battle the sinister Necromorphs yet. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here Megan Aitken's partner lost "a load of photos." Here's my advice for recovering them. Lost files can usually be recovered—if you discover the loss soon enough. But every time you write to the hard drive, you lower the likelihood of a successful recovery. So use that computer as little as possible until the files are recovered or you've given up hope. [Have a tech question? Ask PCWorld Contributing Editor Lincoln Spector. Send your query to answer@pcworld.com.] Try these solutions, in this order: To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here After six months as Acer's chairman, company co-founder Stan Shih plans to step down on June 18, saying he is satisfied with the PC maker's new direction. "The hope is that the company will soon break even and start making money again," he said in an interview on Monday. The company's will appoint new board members in June, and the board will then select the new chairman. Since November, Shih has been leading a major reorganization at the ailing Taiwanese PC maker. In that time, Acer has hired a new CEO, and plans to use software and services to help revive its business. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here Maybe it's the recent release of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint apps for the iPad. Maybe you want to make sure you have access to the latest version of Microsoft's Office suite on your multiple Macs (and even PCs). Or perhaps you want the perks, such as 27GB of total OneDrive cloud storage per user and an hour of free Skype world minutes each month. Whatever the reason, you've weighed your options and decided that an Office 365 subscription makes sense for you. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here Sometimes a little open-mindedness goes a long way. You could dismiss Windows 8 as a "Fisher-Price operating system" that's unfit for real work, as many are oh-so-quick to do, or you could actually take advantage of its unique capabilities, using Windows Store apps to work faster and smarter. And with all the mouse-and-keyboard enhancements in the latest Windows 8.1 Update—especially the introduction of a universal taskbar that houses apps as well as traditional desktop software—these apps are now easier than ever to integrate into your workflow, even if you're pro-Start menu and anti-touch screen. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here If you need Internet access while you're away from your home or the office, you should carry a travel router in your bag. Free Wi-Fi hotspots are nearly always insecure, leaving your PC vulnerable to attack. Fee-based broadband services at hotels often are limited to supporting wired devices, so you won't be able to connect your smartphone or tablet. If the service is wireless, the provider will charge a fee for each device you connect to the network. Use a travel router to connect to a Wi-Fi hotspot or a facility's broadband connection, and it will create a private, secure, wireless network with a robust firewall. You'll be able to use that service with your laptop, smartphone, or tablet, and you'll be able to share that connection with friends, family, and colleagues traveling with you—paying just one fee for everyone. Many travel routers are outfitted with USB ports that support portable hard drives, so you can share files or stream media over your network, too. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Bye, bye URL?
Organize your libraries by content, not file type
http://www.pcworld.com en-us Tue, 06 May 2014 01:52:58 -0700 Tue, 06 May 2014 01:52:58 -0700 Mon, 05 May 2014 23:35:07 -0700 Agam Shah Agam Shah Lenovo is bringing a unique design to Chromebooks with the N20p Chromebook, which has a touchscreen that can rotate roughly 300 degrees to a "stand mode." In close proximity, the stand mode also makes the Chromebook convenient to view media content, said Robert Eckard, Lenovo's senior product manager for notebooks. The N20p Chromebook will be priced at US$329. Lenovo also announced the non-touch N20 Chromebook, which will be priced at $279. The N20p weighs 1.4 kilograms, while the N20 weighs 1.3 kilograms. Both the N20 and N20p laptops have 11.6-inch screens that can display images at a 1366 x 768-pixel resolution. The N20 and N20p are Lenovo's first Chromebooks based on the updated Chrome OS, which hit laptops in September last year. Acer, Samsung and Hewlett-Packard were the first companies to ship Chromebooks with the updated OS. Chrome OS is also being used in mini-desktops from HP, Google and Asustek, and an all-in-one PC from LG. Lenovo already sells the ThinkPad X131e, which started shipping in January 2013 and is based on the first version of Chrome OS. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here A pension and relief fund that sued IBM for failing to warn investors of loss of business in China because of its alleged involvement with spying by the U.S. National Security Agency has voluntarily withdrawn the lawsuit in a New York court. The Louisiana Sheriffs' Pension and Relief Fund has decided to voluntarily dismiss the action after additional investigation into the matters alleged, which included investigations in the U.S. and China and discussions with the defense counsel, John C. Browne, lawyer for the fund, wrote to the court in a letter disclosed Monday. "We said the complaint proceeded to make numerous specious and false accusations, and IBM called upon the law firm that filed this action to do the right thing and dismiss it. We are pleased that they have done the right thing," IBM spokesman Doug Shelton wrote in an emailed statement. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here Lenovo's new N20p, announced Monday night, might look like any other compact Chromebook—there are plenty of them, and most are unremarkable. But the N20p offers two distinctive features: First, its 11.6-inch display is a 10-point touchscreen, a display enhancement that only the Acer C270P offers in this size class. Second, the N20p borrows a trick from its Yoga cousins: Its hinge can rotate up to 300 degrees so that you can prop up the Chromebook in a standing position. That's a first for any Chromebook, and it makes the N20p one of the most interesting Chromebook models to come along since last year's high-end Pixel from Google. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here Hackers claiming to have found a critical flaw in a widely used open-source remote login software, OpenSSH, are likely bluffing, according to a developer affiliated with the project. OpenSSH is used to remotely log into Unix-based systems securely and is incorporated into a number of operating systems, routers and switches made by vendors such as IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Cisco Systems and Red Hat. On Pastebin, the hackers claim that two years ago they found a problem in OpenSSH that can allow data to be remotely accessed from a server. They claim exploiting the flaw can reveal system user hashes, keys and other random data. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here Android console maker Ouya is considering entering the Chinese market as part of its expansion into Asia. China recently ended a 14-year-old ban on foreign-made game consoles, opening the door for companies to tap the market, Ouya CEO Julie Uhrman said Monday. "When we enter a new market we want to do it the right way with the right partners," she added in an interview. The San Francisco company is best known for its US$99 Android gaming system, and last year raised over US$8.5 million on the Kickstarter crowdfunding platform. A few of those early backers came from China, Uhrman said, while attending the Global Mobile Internet Conference in Beijing. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here The Toq smartwatch isn't so much a retail-ready smartwatch as Qualcomm's vision of what a smartwatch can be. Armed with a diverse portfolio of mobile technologies, Qualcomm began releasing a limited run of Toq watches last year—mostly to show off its energy-efficient, always-on Mirasol display technology. And now Qualcomm has advanced its "living proof of concept" model further by integrating voice dictation into the Toq's text messaging feature. Powered by Nuance's voice-to-text engine, Toq users can now respond to incoming text messages by tapping on a microphone icon, and uttering brief replies. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here If you still had your hopes up for a portable Xbox gaming handheld, they just got dashed. In a series of tweets Sunday night, Xbox chief Phil Spencer came clean on some of what gamers can expect from Microsoft during the E3 timeframe this summer. But Spencer also addressed the topic of a handheld Xbox: Put simply, it's probably not going to happen. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here ]]> http://www.pcworld.com/article/2151282/microsofts-xbox-chief-shoots-down-portable-game-console.html#tk.rss_all Mon, 05 May 2014 13:07:00 -0700 Grant Gross Grant Gross The Federal Communications Commission should reclassify portions of broadband networks as regulated, common-carrier services to preserve net neutrality protections, Mozilla has said in a new petition to the agency. After a contentious debate about U.S. net neutrality rules in recent weeks, Mozilla's proposal is an effort to define a "new path" for the FCC, Mozilla senior policy engineer Chris Riley said. The browser maker proposes that the FCC create separate rules for how broadband providers manage traffic for their customers and for websites and Web-based service providers. The FCC should redefine the "remote delivery" service offered by the broadband provider to websites and Web services as a regulated service covered by traditional telephone regulations, Riley wrote in a blog post Monday. The Mozilla proposal would keep the broadband providers' relationship with customers as a lightly regulated information service, as it is today. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here The Apple-Samsung jury returned to court Monday to fix an error in its verdict form, but in doing so it declined to award Apple any additional damages. The correction it made means the trial is now over—pending appeals—and that Samsung must pay Apple $119.5 million in damages, far less than the $2.2 billion it had been seeking. The jury issued its initial verdict late Friday, finding Samsung had infringed two of the patents Apple sued over, and awarding damages for a third patent that Samsung had already been found to infringe. Samsung was cleared of infringing two other patents, and it was awarded $158,400 for Apple's infringement of one Samsung patent. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here The abrupt departure of SAP technology chief Vishal Sikka has prompted a number of questions about the vendor's strategy, particularly in regard to the Hana in-memory computing platform, and what it could mean for customers. There's also some intrigue over what sort of boardroom machinations may have prompted the high profile and widely respected technologist to suddenly leave SAP. Here's a look at both topics. SAP needs a new visionary: Sikka is being replaced by Bernd Leukert, a 20-year veteran of SAP who oversaw the porting of SAP's Business Suite ERP (enterprise resource planning) software to Hana. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here To help organizations get a better handle on the R statistical programming language, which is enjoying a surge in use as a big-data analysis tool, Revolution Analytics has introduced a new support package. "A lot of companies have put so much investment into collecting data they didn't collect before. The next step after capturing big data is to analyze it," said David Smith, Revolution Analytics' chief community officer and head of the new open source solutions group, explaining why organizations may want to take a closer look at the R language. "R is the lingua franca of data science," Smith said. The AdviseR support package cost US$795 per year, per user. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here IBM picked a good day to launch a suite of security tools and services: a Monday morning when many CEOs saw in their news roundup that retailer Target is newly rid of a CEO who presided over a catastrophic data breach. The new IBM Threat Protection System product suite and the Critical Data Protection Program set of IT services are aimed at enterprises that want to protect themselves against data theft. The business consequences of poor enterprise security are growing ever larger, as cybercriminals get more ambitious: last year's intrusion into point-of-sale systems at Target led to the theft of 40 million credit cards and personal data on 70 million people. While the company's CIO was replaced earlier, the chairman and CEO Gregg Steinhafel is now stepping down as well, the retailer announced. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here EMC is taking on Amazon's cloud storage service with a private cloud platform it says will cost less to use. The Elastic Cloud Storage Appliance, launching on Monday at EMC World and delivered by the end of June, is a hyperscale storage system for enterprises to deploy in their own facilities. EMC previewed it last year under the code name Project Nile. The ECS Appliance is part of a wider move into cloud and so-called software-defined storage by EMC, which is looking beyond traditional storage even as the company and most of its customers continue to rely on dedicated hardware platforms. Also on Monday, EMC is introducing ViPR 2.0, an update to its storage virtualization and management software, while rolling out a data-protection appliance for midsize customers under the Data Domain line. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here EMC has agreed to acquire DSSD, a Silicon Valley startup developing technology for pooling server-based flash for high-performance data access. The company will help EMC tackle challenges in making flash capacity on servers into shared storage capacity. Its chairman is Andy Bechtolsheim, a pioneer of networked computing from Sun Microsystems and numerous startups. Its CEO, former 3Par executive Bill Moore, will continue to run the DSSD business inside EMC while Bechtolsheim remains a strategic advisor. Server-based flash offers rapid access to data because it's connected to servers via fast PCIe connections. But it's limited to 10TB or less on each server and is hard to manage, forcing companies to rewrite applications just to use it, said Jeremy Burton, EMC's president of products and marketing, who announced the acquisition at EMC World in Las Vegas. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here Web users and developers should take new steps to avoid surveillance by the U.S. National Security Agency and other spy organizations, a group of privacy and digital rights advocates said Monday. The 30-plus groups, including Fight for the Future, Demand Progress, Reddit, Free Press and the Libertarian Party, have set June 5 as the day to "reset the 'Net" by deploying new privacy tools. June 5 is the anniversary of the first news stories about NSA surveillance based on leaks by former agency contractor Edward Snowden. Governments are building a "prison" around the Internet, the groups said in a video. "But government spies have a weakness," the video said. "They can hack anybody, but they can't hack everybody. Folks like the NSA depend on collecting insecure data from tapped fiber. They depend on our mistakes—mistakes we can fix." To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here AMD took another step ahead toward what it calls "ambidextrous computing" on Monday, announcing a framework for bringing together ARM processors with its own X86 chips in what it calls "Project Skybridge". From a technical standpoint, Project SkyBridge combines the world's two most popular processor architectures: X86, a high-performance chip architcture which dominates the PC, server, and notebook space, and ARM, the low-power, de facto chip architecture for tablets and smartphones. SkyBridge chips, whether they be based on ARM or X86, will be pin-compatible, meaning that they will be able to be used on the same motherboard with minimal changes, if any. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here Antivirus is dead. So sayeth Brian Dye, Symantec's senior vice president for information security, in a weekend interview with The Wall Street Journal. The words sound shocking—Symantec and its Norton antivirus suite have been at the forefront of PC security for years and years. But don't let the stark claim fool you: Norton isn't being retired, and Dye's words merely reflect the new reality in computing protection. While detecting and protecting against malicious software installed on your computer still plays a very vital role, many of the sophisticated attacks of today still manage to penetrate PCs with antivirus programs installed. In fact, Dye told WSJ that he estimates traditional antivirus detects a mere 45 percent of all attacks. That's not good. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here John McAfee thinks the world could use one more messaging app. The former anti-virus software creator and international fugitive is promoting a new app called Chadder, which claims to keep messages secure through key server encryption. The app is available now for Android and Windows Phone, and an iOS version is coming soon. However, the app appears to be in extremely rough shape, not even deserving the "beta" tag that the developers use in their description. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here Google has an interesting idea for upcoming versions of Chrome that could either make browsing safer or destroy the web as we know it. The latest build of Canary, Google's experimental version of the Chrome browser, introduced a feature that does away with URLs, also known as web addresses. The new feature, called the Origin Chip, wasn't enabled by default in my tests. But you can turn it on by enabling the Chrome flag "chrome://flags/#origin-chip-in-omnibox" and setting it to enabled. Although this is very much an experimental feature, you can also enable the Origin Chip in the stable build of Chrome. Above: Canary's Origin Chip. Below: The stable version of Google Chrome. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here [This is a sponsored article written by IDG Creative Lab, a partner of PCWorld, and not by PCWorld's editorial staff.] We've put our whole lives into our computers, tablets, smartphones, and everything else we attach to the Internet. We've got our work mixed in with our private lives, old projects mixed in with new, and music on one device that we want to play on another. All this technology is supposed to make our lives easier, but all too often, it's just plain inconvenient. Here are a few tips and tricks to put your digital world in order, and make your life easier for real. You're working on a complex report. You've got spreadsheets, documents, photos, and so on. Do the photos belong in My Pictures? Of course not. Keep all of the files for a single project in a single folder. Better yet, put two folders in My Documents: Work and Home, and put your project folders in there. And reserve My Pictures for family and personal photos. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here Virtual reality headset maker OculusVR recently came under attack from game development company Zenimax Media, and now Oculus is hitting back. On Thursday, Zenimax accused Oculus of stealing core technology that made the Oculus Rift headset a reality. But on Monday Oculus responded saying the charges are nonsense. "We are disappointed but not surprised by Zenimax's actions and we will prove that all of its claims are false," Oculus VR said in a statement via e-mail. Oculus also said "there is not a line of Zenimax code or any of its technology in any Oculus products." To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here While games from other publishers pop up on Origin here and there, much of EA's PC gaming platform is dedicated to selling titles made by EA itself—and one soon-to-expire promotion will get you the full version of one of the hottest games of yesteryear for free. Until May 8, EA's offering the highly regarded space horror game Dead Space for the low, low price of absolutely nothing on Origin. The game still holds up well despite being nearly six years old; we named it to our list of the most terrifying PC games around just last year. What's more, Dead Space still sells online for $20, so this is a pretty enticing deal for folks who haven't stepped into Isaac Clarke's shoes to battle the sinister Necromorphs yet. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here Megan Aitken's partner lost "a load of photos." Here's my advice for recovering them. Lost files can usually be recovered—if you discover the loss soon enough. But every time you write to the hard drive, you lower the likelihood of a successful recovery. So use that computer as little as possible until the files are recovered or you've given up hope. [Have a tech question? Ask PCWorld Contributing Editor Lincoln Spector. Send your query to answer@pcworld.com.] Try these solutions, in this order: To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here After six months as Acer's chairman, company co-founder Stan Shih plans to step down on June 18, saying he is satisfied with the PC maker's new direction. "The hope is that the company will soon break even and start making money again," he said in an interview on Monday. The company's will appoint new board members in June, and the board will then select the new chairman. Since November, Shih has been leading a major reorganization at the ailing Taiwanese PC maker. In that time, Acer has hired a new CEO, and plans to use software and services to help revive its business. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here Maybe it's the recent release of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint apps for the iPad. Maybe you want to make sure you have access to the latest version of Microsoft's Office suite on your multiple Macs (and even PCs). Or perhaps you want the perks, such as 27GB of total OneDrive cloud storage per user and an hour of free Skype world minutes each month. Whatever the reason, you've weighed your options and decided that an Office 365 subscription makes sense for you. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here Sometimes a little open-mindedness goes a long way. You could dismiss Windows 8 as a "Fisher-Price operating system" that's unfit for real work, as many are oh-so-quick to do, or you could actually take advantage of its unique capabilities, using Windows Store apps to work faster and smarter. And with all the mouse-and-keyboard enhancements in the latest Windows 8.1 Update—especially the introduction of a universal taskbar that houses apps as well as traditional desktop software—these apps are now easier than ever to integrate into your workflow, even if you're pro-Start menu and anti-touch screen. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here If you need Internet access while you're away from your home or the office, you should carry a travel router in your bag. Free Wi-Fi hotspots are nearly always insecure, leaving your PC vulnerable to attack. Fee-based broadband services at hotels often are limited to supporting wired devices, so you won't be able to connect your smartphone or tablet. If the service is wireless, the provider will charge a fee for each device you connect to the network. Use a travel router to connect to a Wi-Fi hotspot or a facility's broadband connection, and it will create a private, secure, wireless network with a robust firewall. You'll be able to use that service with your laptop, smartphone, or tablet, and you'll be able to share that connection with friends, family, and colleagues traveling with you—paying just one fee for everyone. Many travel routers are outfitted with USB ports that support portable hard drives, so you can share files or stream media over your network, too. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click hereBye, bye URL?
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