http://www.pcworld.com en-us Sun, 08 Jun 2014 01:47:33 -0700 Sun, 08 Jun 2014 01:47:33 -0700 Sat, 07 Jun 2014 06:00:00 -0700 Tony Bradley Tony Bradley This week at WWDC, Apple's annual developer conference, Apple showed off some of the new features and capabilities coming soon in iOS 8 and Mac OS X Yosemite. The level of integration between the mobile and desktop operating systems looks impressive, but maybe Apple should be focusing on how to provide that level of integration for Windows users with iOS devices. Apple revealed some very cool capabilities that blur the line between the mobile device and the desktop. Mac OS X has already been able to send and receive messages in Apple's proprietary iMessage service, but Yosemite will be also be able to interact with SMS text messages sent to the user's iPhone. The new version of Mac OS X will also be able to view Caller ID information for incoming calls on the iPhone, and make and receive calls directly from the PC. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here A forgotten Windows password isn't the end of the world. You don't have to trash the computer, or even perform a dreaded factory restore. There are many ways to remove or reset a Windows password, but how quickly and easily it can be done depends on the situation. Password reset methods differ between Microsoft and local Windows accounts. If you aren't sure which type of Windows account you have, it's simple to find out: turn on your computer and see if an email address is displayed above where you enter your password to login. If there's an email, it's a Microsoft account. If not, it's a local account. Resetting the password for Microsoft accounts can be relatively quick and easy. Resetting local accounts, however, takes a hack or a third-party tool. Since computers preloaded with Windows 8 include a new Secure Boot and the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) boot method, using a third-party tool complicates the process further. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here Well, there's apparently one good thing Microsoft's Windows is good at: running the software necessary to manufacture Apple's Mac computers. And the messenger of this information? Apple chief executive Tim Cook himself. On Thursday, Cook tweeted a photo of himself touring Apple's Austin, Texas production line where the Apple Mac Pro is manufactured:
The problem? Right behind Cook is an iMac—and it's clearly running Windows.
To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
]]> http://www.pcworld.com/article/2360671/oops-tim-cook-tweets-photo-of-mac-production-line-running-windows.html#tk.rss_all Software Operating systems Fri, 06 Jun 2014 15:00:00 -0700 Agam Shah Agam Shah Laptops about half the size of current models, along with faster, more power-efficient chips, improvements in wireless connectivity, and 3-D cameras in PCs were among the wares on display this week at Computex in Taipei. What follows is a look at some of the expected advances in computers and technology featured at the show. Intel's 7.2-mm thin Llama Mountain tablet is a reference design showing how svelte the next generation of hybrid PCs could be. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here Ransomware attacks like CryptoLocker have been plaguing users for a while now. The recent shutdown of the Gameover Zeus botnet has led to a dramatic decline in these types of attacks, but you can expect that cybercriminals will regroup and launch new ones soon enough. But KnowBe4, a company that offers security awareness training, is so confident it can teach users to protect themselves, it's offering to pay the ransom if a customer falls victim to a ransomware scheme. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here T-Mobile confirmed that customers had experienced problems with its network on Friday morning, but didn't go into detail. The Web site downdetector.com showed (graphic, above top) that the complaints originated from a number of major metropolitan areas, including Atlanta and the East Coast. The site measures tweets and other social media messages complaining of outages. T-Mobile's Twitter feed was busy responding to customer complaints, mostly advising customers to reboot their phones to take advantage of the fix. Downdetector reported that about 75 percent of the complaints were due to customers being unable to place calls, with most of the others reporting problems with the network's mobile data service. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here Apple may be looking to infuse its mapping software with personally relevant results by incorporating social search with technology acquired from the startup Spotsetter. A Friday TechCrunch report said that Apple had acquired Spotsetter. The company provided personalized recommendations for places to go based on various outside data like content from people's social networks on Facebook and Twitter. Apple declined to comment. But a blog post from Spotsetter published last week said that the company was closing down its app, which was available on iOS and Android. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here As software vendors tend to do during their big annual user conferences, SAP made a lot of promises to customers this week at Sapphire. The overarching theme was a desire to make SAP's software simpler and its customers' lives easier. Like any promise, SAP's pledge will only be as good as the follow-through. Here's a look at the work that lies ahead, as well as some important conclusions drawn from Sapphire's content. It's wait and see on Simple Suite SAP used Sapphire to unveil Simple Finance, a new version of its core financials application that takes advantage of the Hana in-memory computing platform and uses a simplified data model. It plans to give other Business Suite modules the same treatment. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here This is it—the last week before E3. The "calm before the storm" was a lie. Instead, we had a ton of trailers and announcements this week, as publishers try to get out ahead of the E3 news onslaught. Mortal Kombat X, Forza Horizon 2, The Witcher 3, Lord of the Rings—we've got them all here. Let's lead off with the game I'm most excited for, eh? CD Projekt Red gave us a brief glimpse earlier this week during a livestreamed event. The Witcher 3 is scheduled to release February 24, 2015. As with the rest of these titles, you can expect to see more Witcher 3 news next week during E3. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here You don't realize how much you rely on your iOS devices until something goes wrong. That's why, when your iPhone or iPad is lost, stolen, or damaged, many people panic, wondering if they have access to the data they need. Is it in the cloud? Can you pull it off a damaged hard drive? Do your backups cover everything? When was the last time you backed it up? There are plenty of different ways to prepare for an iOS disaster, each with its own merits. Here are some of the most bankable backup methods – each applicable to Windows and OSX - to ensure the important data on your iPhone or iPad is always at the ready, even in the event of a catastrophe. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here A novel form of database that focuses on connections between entities, called a graph database, is finding a home in the health care industry. "In health care, it turns out, there are quite a number of problems that involve understanding the connections between things," said Philip Rathle, vice president of products at Neo Technologies, which sells support subscriptions to its open source Neo4j graph database. Diseases may have multiple symptoms. Doctors may belong to multiple heath care networks. There are also relationships between different types of organizations, such as insurance companies and hospitals. In the realm of bioinformatics, multiple connections exist among genes and proteins. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here Apple showed admirable patience by not revealing an iWatch at WWDC this week, but don't expect this discipline to last for long. A health-focused wearable is coming this fall, source says, and Apple is priming the supply chain for significant manufacturing. On Friday, the Nikkei Asian Review reported that Apple is timing a new wearable to be released alongside iOS 8 in October. Referencing unnamed "industry sources," the website says Apple's new hardware will use a curved OLED display—shades of Samsung's Gear Fit—to help users track health data and receive obligatory smartphone notifications. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here Since the Nokia Lumia 1520's six-inch display has the Windows Phone phablet market seemingly locked up, a number of Microsoft's new Asian partners are going small. Three of Microsoft's newest partners—BLU, Prestigio, and YEZZ—announced new Windows Phones at the Computex show in Taiwan, with several 4-inch phones leading the way. YEZZ even named its phone "Billy" after founder Bill Gates, according to Microsoft. In the United States, Microsoft's own Nokia brand dominates the Windows Phone landscape, ceding just a small fraction of the market to HTC and Samsung. But the company's market share is expected to be just 3.5 percent of all smartphones sold in 2014, according to IDC, with the majority ceded to Android and iOS. In Europe, however, Microsoft's share is 8.1 percent, according to April data from Kantar Worldpanel, and the company has at times climbed to second place in the smartphone market in countries like Italy. Microsoft has also talked aggressively about gaining share in so-called "BRIC" growth-market countries, such as Russia and India (the other two being Brazil and China). To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here A debate in the U.S. about whether the National Security Agency should end its bulk collection of U.S. telephone and business records has come down to an argument over the meaning of the word "bulk." A year after the first leaks by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden were published, it appears that already scaled-back proposals to limit the NSA's bulk collection of U.S. telephone and business records may not even happen. And officials with President Barack Obama's administration, backing an NSA reform bill called the USA Freedom Act, have already begun to pick holes in its definitions. An amended version of the USA Freedom Act that passed the House of Representatives in May would allow the NSA to continue to target wide groups of U.S. records, critics said, because of its expanded definition of the terms the NSA must use to define its searches. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here Free snacks and on-site video games may help companies attract skilled IT workers, but speeding up the hiring cycle is also important. Drawn-out employee searches frustrate IT managers and prompt good candidates to accept jobs elsewhere. Increased corporate IT investment and the technology industry's low unemployment rate have created a candidate-driven market, so companies need to streamline the recruitment process if they want to get their hands on the best IT pros available. "The unemployment for technical jobs in most of our markets is a lower rate than the general unemployment rate," said Victor Gaines, vice president of talent acquisition at Fiserv, which provides financial services technology to banks, retailers and investment firms, among other clients. "Folks who have technical skill sets are finding jobs at a faster rate and they're staying at those jobs [longer] than perhaps some other skill sets." To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here If you're looking for a quick-and-dirty way to take notes on your PC, you can't beat using your browser. No, I'm not talking about online tools like Google Keep, Word Online, or any other text-editing Web app. An easier way to turn your browser into a note-taking machine is to use a little snippet of HTML code that creates an offline notepad in your browser. Coding, you might ask with a shiver? Don't worry, it's beyond simple to use. This notepad trick works because of HTML's "contenteditable" attribute that can turn any part of a web page into an interactive area for editing text. You can use it in Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, and Opera. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here After months of promises, Microsoft finally released Windows drivers for its Xbox One controller, allowing it to pull double duty as wired controller for PC gaming. Unlike the Xbox 360 wireless controller, which required a separate dongle for PC use, all you need to use the Xbox One controller on PC is a standard Micro-USB cable. The wired connection provides the power, so you don't even need batteries. Unfortunately, you can't use the Xbox One controller wirelessly on a PC at this time. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here EU justice ministers on Friday reached a partial agreement on planned new data privacy laws, but they still disagree about how to implement them. Ministers agreed on the rules that govern international data transfers and on the territorial scope of the data protection regulation. In short, EU data protection laws will apply to non-European companies if they do business in the EU. The existing laws weren't clear on this point. The proposal for a Data Protection Regulation to update the old 1995 privacy directive was first put forward by EU Justice Commissioner Viviane Reding. She said on Friday that she was pleased the council of justice ministers had managed to make some headway."It's in the interest of companies to have legal certainty rather than having to spend money on costly lawsuits only to arrive at the same result at the end. Following today's agreements, the data protection reform is on the right track," she said in a speech. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here Mars ain't the kind of place to raise your kids. Neither, for that matter, is Dustball, described as "a cold airless rocky world" in the i Bootis star system. But I'm headed there anyway. A cosmically insignificant 13.8 light seconds away, by my calculations the trip should only take my tiny Sidewinder ship five to ten minutes of in-game flight at maximum speed. Sometime in the last month or so, Elite: Dangerous got filled with quite a bit of space. Elite: Dangerous, modern successor to the 1984 classic open-world space game Elite, entered public beta last week, adding 10,000 new players to the game. It was the perfect excuse I needed to drop everything and hop back into my ship for a few hours. This was the first time I'd been back since Alpha 3, and wow, things have grown a lot more complicated in my absence. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here Canon has quietly launched a new online photo storage and sharing service that is free for anyone to use worldwide. Called Irista, the new photo service offers a free option that includes 10GB of cloud storage with no limits on the number or size of your file uploads. Irista also offers paid options for extra storage, but currently that option is available only in Europe. Canon began developing Irista in 2012 under the name "Project1709." Irista is very bare bones compared to other services such as Dropbox, Flickr, or OneDrive. It is also exclusively a photo storage site with no options to save other types of files. As far as photos go, Irista will only accept JPEG and RAW filetypes, and it will only take RAW if it is in Canon, Nikon, Olympus, Sony, Panasonic, or Samsung formats. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here Many servers expose insecure management interfaces to the Internet through microcontrollers embedded into the motherboard that run independently of the main OS and provide monitoring and administration functions. These Baseboard Management Controllers (BMCs) are part of the Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI), a standardized interface made up of a variety of sensors and controllers that allow administrators to manage servers remotely when they're shut down or unresponsive, but are still connected to the power supply. BMCs are embedded systems that run inside servers and have their own firmware—usually based on Linux. They provide IPMI access through a network service accessible over UDP port 623. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here As promised, Google is giving Chromebook users a way to watch Google Play Movies & TV offline. All you need is the latest version of the app from the Chrome Web Store. In your collection, you should see little download buttons by the bottom-right corner of each show. You can also go into settings and uncheck the "Prefer high quality audio" button. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here Malicious advertisements on domains belonging to Disney, Facebook, The Guardian newspaper and others are leading people to malware that encrypts a computer's files until a ransom is paid, Cisco Systems has found. The finding comes shortly after technology companies and U.S. law enforcement banded together in a large operation to shut down a botnet that distributed online banking malware and so-called "ransomware," a highly profitable scam that has surged over the last year. Cisco's investigation unraveled a technically complex and highly effective way for infecting large number of computers with ransomware, which it described in detail on its blog. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here The National Science Foundation has banned a researcher for using supercomputer resources to generate Bitcoin. In the semiannual report to Congress by the NSF Office of Inspector General, the organization said it received reports of a researcher who was using NSF-funded supercomputers at two universities to mine Bitcoin. Mining is a process to generate the digital currency that involves complex calculations. Bitcoin can be converted to traditional currencies, and 1 Bitcoin was worth roughly $654 on Friday, according to indexes on CoinDesk. Read more: How Bitcoin can go mainstream To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here Verizon has threatened to sue Netflix after the video streaming company started displaying error messages that blamed Verizon for low-quality video streams. In a letter Thursday to Netflix's General Counsel David Hyman, Randal S. Milch, Verizon's general counsel referred to reports that Netflix was displaying messages to users that the "The Verizon network is crowded right now" and that Netflix was adjusting the video for smoother playback. The letter asserts that there is no basis for Netflix to assert that issues relating to playback of any particular video session are attributable solely to Verizon. Traffic on the Internet can be affected by other factors such as Netflix's choices on how to connect to its consumers and deliver content, interconnection between multiple networks, and consumer-end issues such as home wiring, Wi-Fi and device configuration, Verizon added. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here PC convertibles are not new, but Toshiba is releasing one that can change into seven different forms, thanks to its attachable keyboard and a 360-degree hinge. We had a chance to try out the Dynabook Kira L93 at this week's Computex show in Taipei, and found it to be a cool concept, but unwieldy to use. It's a high-end laptop, and will retail for about ¥220,000 (US$2150) when it goes on sale in Japan this month, according to information from two retailers. For that price, a consumer will get a device that feels and looks sleek in its sturdy metal casing. But the major selling point is Kira L93's ability to assume seven different shapes. The device comes as a touchscreen tablet with a foldable kick-stand on its hinge. The additional piece is a wireless keyboard that can attach to the kick-stand. When all three parts are connected together, the device forms into a traditional clamshell laptop. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here Flickr is one of Yahoo's most popular services and since former Googler Marissa Mayer became CEO, Yahoo has been looking to capitalize on the photo-sharing site's popularity. Last year, Yahoo tried to attract more users by offering 1 terabyte of free online photo storage. Now the company is using Flickr as a gateway for creating a Yahoo account—if you didn't have one already, that is. "Starting this month, we will be requesting that everyone use a Yahoo username and password to sign in to Flickr," Markus Spiering, Flickr's head of product, said on the service's forum Friday. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here Vodafone has granted governments direct access to its networks in several countries, allowing them to listen to all conversations on those networks, the company said Friday. Vodafone Group received lawful demands for assistance from a law enforcement agency or government authority in 29 countries between April 1, 2013, and March 31, 2014, it said in its first Law Enforcement Disclosure Report. In most of those countries, Vodafone said it maintains full operational control over the technical infrastructure used to enable lawful interception. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here Though it shoots for the mid-range of the smartphone market, the Kyocera Hydro Vibe boasts some premium elements to it—it's waterproof and shoots 1080p video. But it also falls short where phones in its class can't afford to. For more details read the full review of the Kyocera Hydro Vibe on Greenbot. The Kyocera Hydro Vibe is a bit smaller than rival phones, about the size of the Moto X. It sports a simple black-and-gray design with a grippy plastic backing and a removable 2,000 mAh battery pack. Its 4.5-inch LCD display is bright and fairly usable outdoors, but it's not a high-resolution display. Its viewing angles are passable, but not perfect, and the colors appear a bit faded on some applications. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Agam Shah The Witcher 3
Pick up that can, citizen
http://www.pcworld.com en-us Sun, 08 Jun 2014 01:47:33 -0700 Sun, 08 Jun 2014 01:47:33 -0700 Sat, 07 Jun 2014 06:00:00 -0700 Tony Bradley Tony Bradley This week at WWDC, Apple's annual developer conference, Apple showed off some of the new features and capabilities coming soon in iOS 8 and Mac OS X Yosemite. The level of integration between the mobile and desktop operating systems looks impressive, but maybe Apple should be focusing on how to provide that level of integration for Windows users with iOS devices. Apple revealed some very cool capabilities that blur the line between the mobile device and the desktop. Mac OS X has already been able to send and receive messages in Apple's proprietary iMessage service, but Yosemite will be also be able to interact with SMS text messages sent to the user's iPhone. The new version of Mac OS X will also be able to view Caller ID information for incoming calls on the iPhone, and make and receive calls directly from the PC. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here A forgotten Windows password isn't the end of the world. You don't have to trash the computer, or even perform a dreaded factory restore. There are many ways to remove or reset a Windows password, but how quickly and easily it can be done depends on the situation. Password reset methods differ between Microsoft and local Windows accounts. If you aren't sure which type of Windows account you have, it's simple to find out: turn on your computer and see if an email address is displayed above where you enter your password to login. If there's an email, it's a Microsoft account. If not, it's a local account. Resetting the password for Microsoft accounts can be relatively quick and easy. Resetting local accounts, however, takes a hack or a third-party tool. Since computers preloaded with Windows 8 include a new Secure Boot and the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) boot method, using a third-party tool complicates the process further. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here Well, there's apparently one good thing Microsoft's Windows is good at: running the software necessary to manufacture Apple's Mac computers. And the messenger of this information? Apple chief executive Tim Cook himself. On Thursday, Cook tweeted a photo of himself touring Apple's Austin, Texas production line where the Apple Mac Pro is manufactured:
The problem? Right behind Cook is an iMac—and it's clearly running Windows.
To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
]]> http://www.pcworld.com/article/2360671/oops-tim-cook-tweets-photo-of-mac-production-line-running-windows.html#tk.rss_all Software Operating systems Fri, 06 Jun 2014 15:00:00 -0700 Agam Shah Agam Shah Laptops about half the size of current models, along with faster, more power-efficient chips, improvements in wireless connectivity, and 3-D cameras in PCs were among the wares on display this week at Computex in Taipei. What follows is a look at some of the expected advances in computers and technology featured at the show. Intel's 7.2-mm thin Llama Mountain tablet is a reference design showing how svelte the next generation of hybrid PCs could be. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here Ransomware attacks like CryptoLocker have been plaguing users for a while now. The recent shutdown of the Gameover Zeus botnet has led to a dramatic decline in these types of attacks, but you can expect that cybercriminals will regroup and launch new ones soon enough. But KnowBe4, a company that offers security awareness training, is so confident it can teach users to protect themselves, it's offering to pay the ransom if a customer falls victim to a ransomware scheme. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here T-Mobile confirmed that customers had experienced problems with its network on Friday morning, but didn't go into detail. The Web site downdetector.com showed (graphic, above top) that the complaints originated from a number of major metropolitan areas, including Atlanta and the East Coast. The site measures tweets and other social media messages complaining of outages. T-Mobile's Twitter feed was busy responding to customer complaints, mostly advising customers to reboot their phones to take advantage of the fix. Downdetector reported that about 75 percent of the complaints were due to customers being unable to place calls, with most of the others reporting problems with the network's mobile data service. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here Apple may be looking to infuse its mapping software with personally relevant results by incorporating social search with technology acquired from the startup Spotsetter. A Friday TechCrunch report said that Apple had acquired Spotsetter. The company provided personalized recommendations for places to go based on various outside data like content from people's social networks on Facebook and Twitter. Apple declined to comment. But a blog post from Spotsetter published last week said that the company was closing down its app, which was available on iOS and Android. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here As software vendors tend to do during their big annual user conferences, SAP made a lot of promises to customers this week at Sapphire. The overarching theme was a desire to make SAP's software simpler and its customers' lives easier. Like any promise, SAP's pledge will only be as good as the follow-through. Here's a look at the work that lies ahead, as well as some important conclusions drawn from Sapphire's content. It's wait and see on Simple Suite SAP used Sapphire to unveil Simple Finance, a new version of its core financials application that takes advantage of the Hana in-memory computing platform and uses a simplified data model. It plans to give other Business Suite modules the same treatment. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here This is it—the last week before E3. The "calm before the storm" was a lie. Instead, we had a ton of trailers and announcements this week, as publishers try to get out ahead of the E3 news onslaught. Mortal Kombat X, Forza Horizon 2, The Witcher 3, Lord of the Rings—we've got them all here. Let's lead off with the game I'm most excited for, eh? CD Projekt Red gave us a brief glimpse earlier this week during a livestreamed event. The Witcher 3 is scheduled to release February 24, 2015. As with the rest of these titles, you can expect to see more Witcher 3 news next week during E3. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here You don't realize how much you rely on your iOS devices until something goes wrong. That's why, when your iPhone or iPad is lost, stolen, or damaged, many people panic, wondering if they have access to the data they need. Is it in the cloud? Can you pull it off a damaged hard drive? Do your backups cover everything? When was the last time you backed it up? There are plenty of different ways to prepare for an iOS disaster, each with its own merits. Here are some of the most bankable backup methods – each applicable to Windows and OSX - to ensure the important data on your iPhone or iPad is always at the ready, even in the event of a catastrophe. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here A novel form of database that focuses on connections between entities, called a graph database, is finding a home in the health care industry. "In health care, it turns out, there are quite a number of problems that involve understanding the connections between things," said Philip Rathle, vice president of products at Neo Technologies, which sells support subscriptions to its open source Neo4j graph database. Diseases may have multiple symptoms. Doctors may belong to multiple heath care networks. There are also relationships between different types of organizations, such as insurance companies and hospitals. In the realm of bioinformatics, multiple connections exist among genes and proteins. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here Apple showed admirable patience by not revealing an iWatch at WWDC this week, but don't expect this discipline to last for long. A health-focused wearable is coming this fall, source says, and Apple is priming the supply chain for significant manufacturing. On Friday, the Nikkei Asian Review reported that Apple is timing a new wearable to be released alongside iOS 8 in October. Referencing unnamed "industry sources," the website says Apple's new hardware will use a curved OLED display—shades of Samsung's Gear Fit—to help users track health data and receive obligatory smartphone notifications. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here Since the Nokia Lumia 1520's six-inch display has the Windows Phone phablet market seemingly locked up, a number of Microsoft's new Asian partners are going small. Three of Microsoft's newest partners—BLU, Prestigio, and YEZZ—announced new Windows Phones at the Computex show in Taiwan, with several 4-inch phones leading the way. YEZZ even named its phone "Billy" after founder Bill Gates, according to Microsoft. In the United States, Microsoft's own Nokia brand dominates the Windows Phone landscape, ceding just a small fraction of the market to HTC and Samsung. But the company's market share is expected to be just 3.5 percent of all smartphones sold in 2014, according to IDC, with the majority ceded to Android and iOS. In Europe, however, Microsoft's share is 8.1 percent, according to April data from Kantar Worldpanel, and the company has at times climbed to second place in the smartphone market in countries like Italy. Microsoft has also talked aggressively about gaining share in so-called "BRIC" growth-market countries, such as Russia and India (the other two being Brazil and China). To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here A debate in the U.S. about whether the National Security Agency should end its bulk collection of U.S. telephone and business records has come down to an argument over the meaning of the word "bulk." A year after the first leaks by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden were published, it appears that already scaled-back proposals to limit the NSA's bulk collection of U.S. telephone and business records may not even happen. And officials with President Barack Obama's administration, backing an NSA reform bill called the USA Freedom Act, have already begun to pick holes in its definitions. An amended version of the USA Freedom Act that passed the House of Representatives in May would allow the NSA to continue to target wide groups of U.S. records, critics said, because of its expanded definition of the terms the NSA must use to define its searches. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here Free snacks and on-site video games may help companies attract skilled IT workers, but speeding up the hiring cycle is also important. Drawn-out employee searches frustrate IT managers and prompt good candidates to accept jobs elsewhere. Increased corporate IT investment and the technology industry's low unemployment rate have created a candidate-driven market, so companies need to streamline the recruitment process if they want to get their hands on the best IT pros available. "The unemployment for technical jobs in most of our markets is a lower rate than the general unemployment rate," said Victor Gaines, vice president of talent acquisition at Fiserv, which provides financial services technology to banks, retailers and investment firms, among other clients. "Folks who have technical skill sets are finding jobs at a faster rate and they're staying at those jobs [longer] than perhaps some other skill sets." To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here If you're looking for a quick-and-dirty way to take notes on your PC, you can't beat using your browser. No, I'm not talking about online tools like Google Keep, Word Online, or any other text-editing Web app. An easier way to turn your browser into a note-taking machine is to use a little snippet of HTML code that creates an offline notepad in your browser. Coding, you might ask with a shiver? Don't worry, it's beyond simple to use. This notepad trick works because of HTML's "contenteditable" attribute that can turn any part of a web page into an interactive area for editing text. You can use it in Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, and Opera. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here After months of promises, Microsoft finally released Windows drivers for its Xbox One controller, allowing it to pull double duty as wired controller for PC gaming. Unlike the Xbox 360 wireless controller, which required a separate dongle for PC use, all you need to use the Xbox One controller on PC is a standard Micro-USB cable. The wired connection provides the power, so you don't even need batteries. Unfortunately, you can't use the Xbox One controller wirelessly on a PC at this time. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here EU justice ministers on Friday reached a partial agreement on planned new data privacy laws, but they still disagree about how to implement them. Ministers agreed on the rules that govern international data transfers and on the territorial scope of the data protection regulation. In short, EU data protection laws will apply to non-European companies if they do business in the EU. The existing laws weren't clear on this point. The proposal for a Data Protection Regulation to update the old 1995 privacy directive was first put forward by EU Justice Commissioner Viviane Reding. She said on Friday that she was pleased the council of justice ministers had managed to make some headway."It's in the interest of companies to have legal certainty rather than having to spend money on costly lawsuits only to arrive at the same result at the end. Following today's agreements, the data protection reform is on the right track," she said in a speech. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here Mars ain't the kind of place to raise your kids. Neither, for that matter, is Dustball, described as "a cold airless rocky world" in the i Bootis star system. But I'm headed there anyway. A cosmically insignificant 13.8 light seconds away, by my calculations the trip should only take my tiny Sidewinder ship five to ten minutes of in-game flight at maximum speed. Sometime in the last month or so, Elite: Dangerous got filled with quite a bit of space. Elite: Dangerous, modern successor to the 1984 classic open-world space game Elite, entered public beta last week, adding 10,000 new players to the game. It was the perfect excuse I needed to drop everything and hop back into my ship for a few hours. This was the first time I'd been back since Alpha 3, and wow, things have grown a lot more complicated in my absence. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here Canon has quietly launched a new online photo storage and sharing service that is free for anyone to use worldwide. Called Irista, the new photo service offers a free option that includes 10GB of cloud storage with no limits on the number or size of your file uploads. Irista also offers paid options for extra storage, but currently that option is available only in Europe. Canon began developing Irista in 2012 under the name "Project1709." Irista is very bare bones compared to other services such as Dropbox, Flickr, or OneDrive. It is also exclusively a photo storage site with no options to save other types of files. As far as photos go, Irista will only accept JPEG and RAW filetypes, and it will only take RAW if it is in Canon, Nikon, Olympus, Sony, Panasonic, or Samsung formats. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here Many servers expose insecure management interfaces to the Internet through microcontrollers embedded into the motherboard that run independently of the main OS and provide monitoring and administration functions. These Baseboard Management Controllers (BMCs) are part of the Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI), a standardized interface made up of a variety of sensors and controllers that allow administrators to manage servers remotely when they're shut down or unresponsive, but are still connected to the power supply. BMCs are embedded systems that run inside servers and have their own firmware—usually based on Linux. They provide IPMI access through a network service accessible over UDP port 623. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here As promised, Google is giving Chromebook users a way to watch Google Play Movies & TV offline. All you need is the latest version of the app from the Chrome Web Store. In your collection, you should see little download buttons by the bottom-right corner of each show. You can also go into settings and uncheck the "Prefer high quality audio" button. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here Malicious advertisements on domains belonging to Disney, Facebook, The Guardian newspaper and others are leading people to malware that encrypts a computer's files until a ransom is paid, Cisco Systems has found. The finding comes shortly after technology companies and U.S. law enforcement banded together in a large operation to shut down a botnet that distributed online banking malware and so-called "ransomware," a highly profitable scam that has surged over the last year. Cisco's investigation unraveled a technically complex and highly effective way for infecting large number of computers with ransomware, which it described in detail on its blog. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here The National Science Foundation has banned a researcher for using supercomputer resources to generate Bitcoin. In the semiannual report to Congress by the NSF Office of Inspector General, the organization said it received reports of a researcher who was using NSF-funded supercomputers at two universities to mine Bitcoin. Mining is a process to generate the digital currency that involves complex calculations. Bitcoin can be converted to traditional currencies, and 1 Bitcoin was worth roughly $654 on Friday, according to indexes on CoinDesk. Read more: How Bitcoin can go mainstream To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here Verizon has threatened to sue Netflix after the video streaming company started displaying error messages that blamed Verizon for low-quality video streams. In a letter Thursday to Netflix's General Counsel David Hyman, Randal S. Milch, Verizon's general counsel referred to reports that Netflix was displaying messages to users that the "The Verizon network is crowded right now" and that Netflix was adjusting the video for smoother playback. The letter asserts that there is no basis for Netflix to assert that issues relating to playback of any particular video session are attributable solely to Verizon. Traffic on the Internet can be affected by other factors such as Netflix's choices on how to connect to its consumers and deliver content, interconnection between multiple networks, and consumer-end issues such as home wiring, Wi-Fi and device configuration, Verizon added. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here PC convertibles are not new, but Toshiba is releasing one that can change into seven different forms, thanks to its attachable keyboard and a 360-degree hinge. We had a chance to try out the Dynabook Kira L93 at this week's Computex show in Taipei, and found it to be a cool concept, but unwieldy to use. It's a high-end laptop, and will retail for about ¥220,000 (US$2150) when it goes on sale in Japan this month, according to information from two retailers. For that price, a consumer will get a device that feels and looks sleek in its sturdy metal casing. But the major selling point is Kira L93's ability to assume seven different shapes. The device comes as a touchscreen tablet with a foldable kick-stand on its hinge. The additional piece is a wireless keyboard that can attach to the kick-stand. When all three parts are connected together, the device forms into a traditional clamshell laptop. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here Flickr is one of Yahoo's most popular services and since former Googler Marissa Mayer became CEO, Yahoo has been looking to capitalize on the photo-sharing site's popularity. Last year, Yahoo tried to attract more users by offering 1 terabyte of free online photo storage. Now the company is using Flickr as a gateway for creating a Yahoo account—if you didn't have one already, that is. "Starting this month, we will be requesting that everyone use a Yahoo username and password to sign in to Flickr," Markus Spiering, Flickr's head of product, said on the service's forum Friday. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here Vodafone has granted governments direct access to its networks in several countries, allowing them to listen to all conversations on those networks, the company said Friday. Vodafone Group received lawful demands for assistance from a law enforcement agency or government authority in 29 countries between April 1, 2013, and March 31, 2014, it said in its first Law Enforcement Disclosure Report. In most of those countries, Vodafone said it maintains full operational control over the technical infrastructure used to enable lawful interception. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here Though it shoots for the mid-range of the smartphone market, the Kyocera Hydro Vibe boasts some premium elements to it—it's waterproof and shoots 1080p video. But it also falls short where phones in its class can't afford to. For more details read the full review of the Kyocera Hydro Vibe on Greenbot. The Kyocera Hydro Vibe is a bit smaller than rival phones, about the size of the Moto X. It sports a simple black-and-gray design with a grippy plastic backing and a removable 2,000 mAh battery pack. Its 4.5-inch LCD display is bright and fairly usable outdoors, but it's not a high-resolution display. Its viewing angles are passable, but not perfect, and the colors appear a bit faded on some applications. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here Agam Shah The Witcher 3
Pick up that can, citizen
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