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Android grabs record 85 percent smartphone share

Written By Unknown on Kamis, 31 Juli 2014 | 16.01

Google's dominance of the smartphone market has reached new heights, with its Android operating system now accounting for a record 84.6 percent share of global smartphone shipments, according to research by Strategy Analytics.

The growth in Android phones during the second quarter of this year came at the expense of BlackBerry, Apple iOS and Microsoft's Windows Phone, the research firm said Wednesday.

Android accounted for 249.6 million smartphones shipped in the quarter, up from 186.8 million a year earlier, and about seven times more than the 35.2 million Apple iOS phones shipped. The market share of Apple's iOS slipped to 11.9 percent in the quarter from 13.4 percent in the same quarter last year.

"Android's global growth is being driven by strong demand for low-cost smartphones across most major regions such as China, India and Africa," Neil Mawston, Strategy Analytics' executive director, wrote in an email. ("The main threat to Android's future growth is Apple's upcoming portfolio of larger-screen iPhones during the next three to six months."

Millions of Android users worldwide will likely switch to the bigger-screen iPhones later this year, Mawston added.

Overall global smartphone shipments grew 27 percent annually in the quarter to 295.2 million units from 233 million a year earlier. While growth has slowed to its lowest level in five years, it remains strong in Asia and Africa and weaker in North America and Europe.

The latest shipments tally was in line with numbers released on Tuesday by IDC, which said top-ranked Samsung saw its market share slip to 25.2 percent in the quarter from 32.3 percent a year earlier.

Strategy Analytics said earlier this month that the number of smartphone users around the world will approach 2.5 billion by the end of 2015, fueled by strong growth in East Asia.


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No patch yet for zero day in Symantec Endpoint Protection software driver

A zero-day flaw in a software driver in Symantec's widely used Endpoint Protection product may be tricky to fix.

The flaw is contained in the Application and Device Control driver, which is in Endpoint Protection versions 11.x and 12.x, the security company wrote in an advisory on Wednesday.

The vulnerability in Endpoint Protection was found by training and penetration testing company Offensive Security, one of three it uncovered in the product during a recent penetration test of a financial services firm.

All are privilege escalation vulnerabilities, which would allow a user with restricted access to gain higher access on a computer, which could be parlayed into broader network access.

So far, no known compromises have been reported, Symantec said, writing that the medium severity flaw is being handled "with the utmost urgency and care."

Software drivers are not easy to upgrade. It wasn't clear if users will have to reinstall Endpoint Protection with an upgraded driver or if Symantec can issue a patch.

The disclosure comes as a researcher from Singapore security firm COSEINC warned antivirus programs frequently have security flaws, making the applications prime targets for attack due to their deep integration with a computer's operating system.

Mati Aharoni, lead trainer and developer for Offensive Security, said the company plans to preview proof-of-concept code for the Endpoint Protection flaw during its Advanced Windows Exploitation training class at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas next month. Offensive Security published a video earlier this week demonstrating what it said was a successful attack.

Administrators have a few options to mitigate the risk in the meantime. Symantec published instructions for disabling the Application and Device Control driver in Endpoint Protection version 12.1. For those on versions 11.x, the Application and Device control policy can be disabled.


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Samsung profit sags amid Chinese competition

Samsung Electronics' second-quarter profit fell nearly 20 percent as cheaper phones from Chinese makers sapped its sales and the market is waiting for Apple's next iPhone.

The Suwon, South Korea-based company said Thursday it posted a net profit of 6.25 trillion Korean won (about US$6.1 billion) for the quarter, down from close to 8 trillion won a year before.

Revenue was over 52 trillion won, almost 9 percent down from the same quarter last year. Earlier this month, Samsung issued a revenue guidance in the range of 51 to 53 trillion won.

Samsung attributed its poor sales of mid- to low-end handsets to intensified price competition from Chinese manufacturers and sluggish demand in Europe. It also blamed its performance on weaker global demand for tablets.

Operating profit in the mobile business fell about 30 percent from a year earlier to 4.42 trillion won, while revenue dropped 20 percent to 28.5 trillion won in the quarter.

In the second half of 2014, market demand will grow due to strong seasonality but price competition will also intensify, said Hyunjoon Kim, senior vice president in Samsung's mobile communications division, during an earnings conference.

To compete against cheaper Chinese smartphones, Samsung will "respond actively" in terms of price and by focusing on a small number of product lines to improve profitability in the mid- to low-end segment. The company is preparing two new large-screen flagship smartphones as well as new lineups of lower-end phones in the global market in the second half. 

Kim also said the company sees more growth potential in the wearable device market, and will aim for diverse portfolios. He did not provide any details.

Samsung also said in a statement it will increase the availability of its Galaxy Tab S and Galaxy Tab 4.

The world's largest smartphone maker shipped 74.3 million smartphones in the second quarter, according to IDC research. Samsung's global market share fell to 25 percent from 32 percent a year earlier while Chinese manufacturers Huawei Technologies and Lenovo expanded their presence, IDC said earlier this week.

Smartphone users are anticipating Apple's rumored announcement of the new iPhone 6, which is said to feature a larger screen than the current 4-inch display. Apple typically launches iPhone models in mid-September in time for the holiday shopping season.

"We expect 5.5-inch screens to grow more," Melissa Chau, a senior research manager at IDC in Singapore, said in a phone interview. "We've seen the trend already that a quarter of smartphones have a 5-inch screen or bigger. It's just big enough to watch video."

Phones packing screens measuring 5.5 inches to under 7 inches, known as phablets, are also eating away at the 7-inch tablet market, Chau added.

Samsung had planned to release the first smartphone running the Tizen OS, the Samsung Z, with a roll out in Russia. Tizen is an open source, Linux-based system that the South Korean company is backing to challenge dominant smartphone software players Google and Apple.

Tizen would have been a good move if Samsung could have done it by now, Chau said, because the company has the scale to convert its existing feature phones without directly competing against Android.

"The ship for adding another ecosystem may have already sailed," she added.


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iPhone gets first free app for encrypting voice calls

Written By Unknown on Rabu, 30 Juli 2014 | 16.01

An open-source project has released the first free application for the iPhone that scrambles voice calls, which would thwart government surveillance or eavesdropping by hackers.

Signal comes from Open Whisper Systems, which developed RedPhone and TextSecure, both Android applications that encrypt calls and text messages.

The application is compatible with RedPhone and eventually RedPhone and TextSecure will be combined in a single Android application and called Signal as well, according to a blog post.

Signal is notable for two reasons. First, it's free. There are many voice call encryption products on the market for various platforms, most of which are not cheap and are aimed at enterprise users.

Second, Signal is open source code, meaning developers can look at the code and verify its integrity. That's important because of concerns that software vendors have been pressured into adding "backdoors" into their products that could assist government surveillance programs.

The beauty of Signal is its simplicity. Setup requires verifying the device's phone number through a one-time code that is sent by SMS. Signal displays only the contact details of the other user who has it installed.

It provides end-to-end encryption of voice calls over a data connection. Signal displays two words on a screen during a call, which are meant to be verified with the party on the other end to ensure a man-in-the-middle attack isn't underway.

Signal adds to a growing number of mobile encryption offerings from software vendors. Silent Circle, based in Washington, D.C., offers encrypted calling and texting services for a monthly subscription, and is a partner in Geneva-based SGP Technologies which makes the BlackPhone, a security minded device released last month.


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Amazon says $9.99 e-books will boost revenue, including for Hachette

Amazon.com believes that pricing ebooks at US$9.99 will boost sales by over 74 percent as the books are highly price-elastic.

If customers would buy 100,000 copies of a particular ebook at $14.99, then they would buy 174,000 copies of the same ebook at $9.99, boosting total revenue to $1.7 million from about $1.5 million if the book is sold at $14.99, Amazon said in a post Tuesday.

The company said its estimates of the price-elasticity of ebooks were based on repeated measurements across many titles.

Low prices will also help ebooks counter the growing threat from alternatives, including social networking sites and television. "Keep in mind that books don't just compete against books," Amazon said. "Books compete against mobile games, television, movies, Facebook, blogs, free news sites and more."

The Internet retailer has a dispute with publisher Hachette which was rumored to be over the pricing of ebooks. Amazon is said to have delayed shipments of the publisher's books or listed them as unavailable, which led to allegations that it was misusing its dominance of the online books business.

Amazon proposed the $9.99 price for ebooks in an update on the dispute, stating it is providing specific information about Amazon's objectives.

At $9.99, even though the customer is paying less, the total pie is bigger and there is more to share among the parties. Yet, many ebooks are being released at $14.99 and even $19.99, a practice Amazon does not entirely plan to discontinue, as it expects that the higher prices may be justified for "a small number of specialized titles."

The transition from print to ebooks has changed the economics for the various players in the business, making lower prices possible, according to Amazon. "With an ebook, there's no printing, no over-printing, no need to forecast, no returns, no lost sales due to out-of-stock, no warehousing costs, no transportation costs, and there is no secondary market—ebooks cannot be resold as used books," Amazon said.

The company said it is willing to take 30 percent of the price, with the author and publisher each getting 35 percent. "We believe Hachette is sharing too small a portion with the author today, but ultimately that is not our call," it added.

A large number of authors have criticized Amazon in the current dispute, with some claiming that Amazon got implicit sanction for its anticompetitive tactics after the U.S. Department of Justice filed an antitrust suit against Apple and five major U.S. publishers for trying to fix prices in the ebook market.

U.S. District Judge Denise Cote of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York ruled last year that Apple and the publishers including Hachette had conspired to raise prices in the ebook market to counter Amazon. Apple has appealed the order, and also come to an out-of-court settlement with U.S. states and a consumer group in the suit. The settlement amount will depend on the outcome of the appeal.

In its post on Tuesday, Amazon referred to the antitrust dispute, stating that Hachette had forced the retailer to take 30 percent of total revenue in 2010 "when they illegally colluded with their competitors to raise ebook prices." Amazon said it had a problem then with the price increases but not its share of revenue.

Hachette could not be immediately reached for comment.


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Amazon investing $2 billion more in India as online retail booms

Amazon.com is investing US$2 billion more in India, which is witnessing an online retail boom.

The online retailer has been expanding in India, and earlier this week said it was setting up five new fulfillment centers in the country, which will double its total storage capacity to over half a million square feet (over 46,500 square meters).

The investment announcement comes a day after a top Indian online retailer, Flipkart Internet, said it had raised $1 billion in new funding.

India's online retail spending is forecast to reach $16 billion by 2018, an eightfold increase from 2013, according to Forrester Research. "Mobile Internet access will be a catalyst for the growth of online retail in India," wrote Forrester analyst Jitender Miglani in March.

India will be Amazon's fastest country to reach one billion dollars in gross sales if current growth rates continue, Amazon said Wednesday.

The company did not say how or over what period it will make the investment.

"We don't comment on any future plans," a company spokeswoman said. "We are committed to aggressively investing in growing the business and relentlessly focus on raising the bar for online shopping experience in India."

As a result of Indian government restrictions on foreign investment in online retail in India, Amazon set up a marketplace last year, Amazon.in, which offers sales and order fulfillment services to Indian retailers, but does not sell directly.

The company also operates the Junglee.com website, a search and comparison site for Indian shoppers who can browse for a variety of retailers, including offline sellers and vendors of second-hand goods.

The Amazon marketplace offers over 17 million products from thousands of small and medium-size businesses.


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Using Instagram on public Wi-Fi poses risk of an account hijack, researcher says

Written By Unknown on Selasa, 29 Juli 2014 | 16.01

A configuration problem in Facebook's popular Instagram application for Apple devices could allow a hacker to hijack a person's account if they're both on the same public Wi-Fi network.

Stevie Graham, who describes himself as a "hacker at large" based in London, wrote on Twitter that Facebook won't pay him a reward for reporting the flaw, which he said he found years ago.

Graham wrote he hopes to draw more attention to the issue by writing a tool that could quickly compromise many Instagram accounts. He cheekily calls the tool "Instasheep," a play on Firesheep, a Firefox extension that can compromise online accounts in certain circumstances.

"I think this attack is extremely severe because it allows full session hijack and is easily automated," according to Graham's technical writeup. "I could go to the Apple Store tomorrow and reap thousands of accounts in one day, and then use them to post spam."

Graham's finding is a long-known configuration problem that has prompted many Web companies to fully encrypt all connections made with their servers. The transition to full encryption, signified by "https" in a browser URL bar and by the padlock symbol, can be technically challenging.

Instagram's API (application programming interface) makes unencrypted requests to some parts of its network, Graham wrote. That poses an opportunity for a hacker who is on the same Wi-Fi network that doesn't use encryption or uses the outdated WEP encryption, which can be easily cracked.

Some of those Instagram API calls transmit an unencrypted session cookie, or a data file that lets Instagram know a user is still logged in. By collecting the network traffic, known as a man-in-the-middle attack, the session cookie can be stolen and used by an attacker to gain control of the victim's account.

Facebook officials didn't have an immediate comment, but Instagram's co-founder, Mike Krieger, wrote on Ycombinator's Hacker News feed that Instagram has been "steadily increasing" use of full encryption.

Its "Instagram Direct" service, which allows photos to be shared with only small groups of people, is fully encrypted, he wrote. For more latency-sensitive endpoints, such as Instagram's main feed, the service is trying to make sure the transition to https doesn't affect performance, he wrote.

"This is a project we're hoping to complete soon, and we'll share our experiences in our [engineering] blog so other companies can learn from it as well," Krieger wrote.

Google offered full encryption as an option for Gmail in 2008, but two years later made it the default. Facebook switched it on by default in January 2011


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Rhapsody reaches 2M subscribers, bets on new unRadio service

Rhapsody International, which operates the Rhapsody and Napster music services, said Tuesday it plans to expand in France and Latin America as a result of deals with mobile operators SRF and Telefonica.

The streaming music company said it had reached 2 million paying subscribers for both its premium music services and the Rhapsody unRadio Internet radio service it launched in tandem with T-Mobile US last month.

Launched as way back as 2001, Rhapsody trails behind later entrants like Spotify which claims some 10 million paying subscribers. It may soon face stiff competition from players like Amazon.com, Apple and Google, which are at various stages of having their own music services.

The European Commission on Monday cleared Apple's proposed US$3 billion acquisition of Beats Electronics, a headphone maker, and its Beats Music streaming music service.

Rhapsody said in April it had 1.7 million subscribers worldwide for both Rhapsody and Napster services across 32 countries.

The advertisement-free unRadio service allows users to skip songs, and mark their favorite songs to save and listen to them at any time even without a connection.

T-Mobile offered the service at no extra cost to customers who were subscribed to a package on its unlimited 4G LTE data service. The operator announced that unRadio would be available at a discounted price of $4 per month for other T-Mobile customers. Rhapsody separately priced the service at $4.99 per month, offering it free to current users of its premium service.

Rhapsody now plans to extend the service to Europe. The Napster division and French mobile operator SFR will offer the unRadio service in France under the Napster brand, as Napster Decouverte. The service will be priced at €3.95 per month.

Under an earlier agreement with Telefonica, by which select businesses of the operator in Europe and Latin America will deliver the Napster premier music service to mobile and fixed line customers, Napster and Telefonica have launched the Napster premier service in several new countries, including Argentina, Chile and Uruguay.

Assets of the Napster business, which started as a file-sharing site, were acquired by Rhapsody from Best Buy in December 2011. The Napster brand is used outside the U.S.


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Huawei's smartphones shipments rise on international sales

Huawei Technologies shipped 62 percent more smartphones in the first half of 2014 than the same period last year, with shipments to some countries outside its home market of China doubling or even tripling.

It shipped smartphone 34.3 million units, boosted by sales of flagship phones the Ascend Mate 2 and the Ascend P7, it said on Tuesday. In the second quarter alone it shipped 20.6 million units, an 85 percent year-over-year increase.

Much of that growth is coming from emerging markets in the Middle East, Africa and Latin America, where its smartphone shipments are doubling or even tripling compared to the previous year, the company added.

Other Chinese vendors are also reporting booming smartphone sales, but Huawei ships a higher proportion of its production to foreign markets, said Melissa Chau, an analyst with research firm IDC.

"It has the most number of shipments outside of China, roughly 40 percent," she estimated. "If you look at Lenovo, ZTE, or Xiaomi, they are nowhere near that."

In this year's second quarter, Huawei will hold on to its ranking as the world's third-largest smartphone vendor, behind leader Samsung Electronics and second place Apple, Chau added.

In foreign markets, Huawei is driving growth by selling low-end models, while flagship products such as the Ascend P7 find most of their buyers in mainland China, Chau said.

Huawei has ambitions to rival Apple and Samsung in the smartphone arena, so is spending more on marketing and raising brand awareness. But its market share in this year's first quarter was only 4.7 percent, still far away from second place Apple, which had a 15.2 percent share.

"They are making some progress, but they are still not anywhere near being a super top-tier player," Chau said. Android smartphones are also becoming commoditized, which risks dampening Huawei's attempts to stand out from the rest of the competition, she added.


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LTE network for US public safety taking it one step at a time

Written By Unknown on Senin, 28 Juli 2014 | 16.01

The organizers of the FirstNet LTE public safety network have the frequencies and standards they need to build the system, and they know where the money's coming from. They know how to get there from here, but it won't be a quick trip.

FirstNet will realize a vision that emerged in the wake of the 9/11 terror attacks, using technology that didn't exist until years later. It will be a single network linking all federal, state and local public-safety agencies in the U.S., based on the same radio spectrum and technology throughout. Though it won't replace every public-safety radio system in use today, FirstNet will help to eliminate the crazy quilt of incompatible radio systems and frequencies that makes it hard for different teams to coordinate their efforts.

That's no small matter when the news is bad enough to send first responders from multiple cities, counties or states converging on one area. For example, the many firefighting forces that battle summer blazes around the West often can't communicate directly with each other because they use different types of radios and different frequency bands, said TJ Kennedy, acting general manager of the First Responder Network Authority (FirstNet), which is in charge of making the network a reality.

The systems that first responders use now, including more than 10,000 separate LMRS (land mobile radio system) networks, also fall short of many users' needs. Some public-safety employees have to use their own smartphones in order to use apps, send photos and make calls in the field, according to Kennedy. Once FirstNet's built, all agencies will be able to sign up for the same national service, built on modern mobile broadband technology. It will span not just the 50 states but also U.S. territories, such as Puerto Rico, Guam and the Virgin Islands, and is intended to cover as much land as possible. In some cases that will probably require satellite, but most wireless will go over land-based LTE.

As with any effort to coordinate across 50 states and six territories, spanning about 60,000 public safety agencies, the network won't happen overnight. In fact, FirstNet isn't committing to any precise timeline or budget for getting it done. To give an idea how long the effort might take, there's a 46-step process that has to be carried out for each state and territory. The group is making progress: In many states, it's on step 7, Kennedy said.

That long process is designed to make sure the FirstNet system serves the needs of each state. FirstNet is meeting with local agencies and others involved with the issue, educating them about the technology and finding out what they want out of it.

"The geography and the needs of public safety in Maryland are probably very different from the needs in Alaska," Kennedy said.

Ultimately, each state and territory will choose whether to build the local wireless portion of the network themselves or have FirstNet do it. They can't opt out of the system altogether. Once the wireless infrastructure is in place, individual police departments, fire departments and other agencies will sign up and pay for service on FirstNet in much the same way they now buy service from a commercial mobile operator. FirstNet expects the service to be competitively priced, Kennedy said.

The network itself will be built and operated by carriers or other bidders that respond to FirstNet RFPs (requests for proposals), which will lay out the requirements for the system. Those criteria are still being set.

There's better news on the funding and technology for FirstNet.

Though not all the money is there yet, the funding sources for the system are secure, Kennedy said. The law that authorizes the network says the money to build it will come from three national auctions of wireless spectrum, which are forecast to bring in about US$7 billion. One of those, the so-called H Block auction, has already generated about $1.5 billion. Still to come are the sale of a band called AWS-3 to mobile operators, coming in November, and later the so-called incentive auctions to convert TV frequencies to mobile broadband.

FirstNet is also likely to be an easy fit with other networks and devices. It's designed to run entirely on IP (Internet Protocol), with a fast wired backbone in the core and LTE wireless networks at the edge. Because all the major commercial carriers in the U.S. use LTE, any gear that goes into the network or into first responders' hands can be based on the same mass-produced technologies, keeping costs down.

Unlike current public-safety systems, FirstNet will also have enough bandwidth to carry voice, video and data on mobile devices. The network has been assigned a 20MHz chunk of spectrum in the 700MHz band, comparable to what the major commercial carriers are using in that band. Carriers like 700MHz for its long-reaching signals and ability to penetrate walls.

Some devices on the market already are equipped to use FirstNet's band, and more will follow, Kennedy said. Some other countries have adopted the same band for public safety, most importantly Canada, which shares a continent-wide border with the U.S. This could allow for interoperability between U.S. and Canadian systems if needed, he said.


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Verizon will throttle heaviest LTE data users starting in October

If you have an unlimited data plan with Verizon and use it heavily, here's some bad news: Verizon says it will begin throttling the "top 5 percent" of LTE data users in certain situations starting in October.

Under the new new policy, which was announced in a posting to the Verizon website entitled "Ensuring the Optimal Wireless Experience," the carrier reserves the right to limit 4G LTE data speeds for the heaviest unlimited data users as network conditions dictate.

"While all major wireless carriers employ tools to manage the traffic on their networks, Verizon Wireless uses network intelligence to slow the speeds of only some of its heaviest users on unlimited data plans, and only when those users are connected to a cell site that is experiencing peak usage at that particular time," the post states. "Once the heavy usage eases, or the user moves to a different cell site, the user's speeds return to normal."

Verizon employed a similar policy to limit data speeds for heavy 3G data users under certain circumstances in the past. The carrier also notes that this policy will not impact the vast majority of its users.

While any sort of data-speed throttling isn't ideal for users, Verizon's arrangement of throttling the heaviest users only when the network is congested is arguably a better approach than what some other carriers employ. For example, AT&T throttles unlimited plan users when their monthly data usage exceeds 3GB on 3G and 5GB on LTE, regardless of the network conditions.

Still, when your plan says "unlimited," you expect it to not have any restrictions or strings attached.


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Until the Tails privacy tool is patched, here's how to stay safe

Vulnerabilities in the Tails operating system could reveal your IP address, but you can avoid trouble by taking a couple of precautions.

Tails, a portable operating system that employs a host of privacy-focused components, plans to patch flaws contained in I2P, a networking tool developed by the Invisible Internet Project that provides greater anonymity when browsing. It's similar in concept to Tor.

On Saturday, I2P developers released several fixes for XSS (cross-site scripting) and remote execution flaws found by Exodus Intelligence, a vulnerability broker that irked some by announcing first on Twitter it knew of flaws but didn't immediately inform Tails.

It wasn't clear when Tails would release an update with I2P's fixes. It couldn't be immediately reached Sunday.

On Friday, Tails advised that users can take steps to protect themselves in the meantime. It recommended that I2P not be intentionally launched in Tails version 1.1 and earlier.

Luckily, I2P is not launched by default when Tails is started. But Tails warned that an attacker could use some other undisclosed security holes to launch Tails and then try to de-anonymize a user. To be sure that doesn't happen, the I2P software package should be removed when Tails is launched.

The danger of hackers using the I2P vulnerabilities is mitigated somewhat by the fact the details of the flaws haven't been disclosed publicly. But Tails wrote that hackers may have figured them out.

Even general descriptions of vulnerabilities often give hackers enough information of where to start hunting for flaws, enabling them to figure out the exact problems.

To execute an attack on I2P, a hacker must also lure someone to a website where they've manipulated the content, Tails said. That sort of lure is usually set using social engineering, successfully tricking a person into loading malicious content. Savvy users may spot such a lure, but it's easy to get tricked.

Soon after it wrote on Twitter of the flaws, Exodus Intelligence said it would provide the details to Tails and not sell the information to its customers. It wasn't clear if public pressure influenced Exodus.

The company wouldn't say if it would make similar exceptions for privacy-focused software in the future such as Tails, which has been recommended by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden.


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Phone unlocking bill clears US House, next step is president's signature

Written By Unknown on Minggu, 27 Juli 2014 | 16.01

A bill that allows consumers to unlock their cellphones for use on other carriers passed its last hurdle in Congress on Friday, opening the way for it to become law once it is signed by President Obama.

Senate Bill 517 overturns a January 2013 decision by the Congressional Librarian that ruled the unlocking of phones by consumers fell afoul of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). It had previously been permitted under an exception to the anti-circumvention provisions of the DMCA, which are generally aimed at cracking of digital rights management technology.

Cellphones and smartphones are typically supplied to consumers with a software lock that restricts their use to a single wireless carrier. Removing that lock—the process of "unlocking" the phone—means it can be used on the networks of competing carriers. In the U.S., this is most often done with handsets that work on the AT&T or T-Mobile networks, which share a common technology, but is also popular with consumers who want to take their phones overseas and use foreign networks rather than roaming services.

The Unlocking Consumer Choice and Wireless Competition Act has made fast progress through Congress. It was passed by the Senate on July 16, just a week after it was passed by the Senate Judiciary Committee, and on Friday by unanimous vote in the House of Representatives. It now waits to be signed into law.

In addition to making the unlocking process legal under copyright law, the bill also directs the librarian of Congress to determine whether other portable devices with wireless capability, such as tablets, should be eligible for unlocking. 

"It took 19 months of activism and advocacy, but we're finally very close to consumers regaining the right to unlock the phones they've legally bought," said Sina Khanifar, who organized an online petition that kicked off the push to have the Library of Congress decision overturned. The petition attracted more than 114,000 signatures on the White House's "We The People" site. In its response to the petition, the Obama administration called for the legalization of cell phone unlocking.

"I'm looking forward to seeing this bill finally become law—it's been a long road against powerful, entrenched interests—but it's great to see citizen advocacy work," Khanifar said in a statement.


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LTE network for US public safety taking it one step at a time

The organizers of the FirstNet LTE public safety network have the frequencies and standards they need to build the system, and they know where the money's coming from. They know how to get there from here, but it won't be a quick trip.

FirstNet will realize a vision that emerged in the wake of the 9/11 terror attacks, using technology that didn't exist until years later. It will be a single network linking all federal, state and local public-safety agencies in the U.S., based on the same radio spectrum and technology throughout. Though it won't replace every public-safety radio system in use today, FirstNet will help to eliminate the crazy quilt of incompatible radio systems and frequencies that makes it hard for different teams to coordinate their efforts.

That's no small matter when the news is bad enough to send first responders from multiple cities, counties or states converging on one area. For example, the many firefighting forces that battle summer blazes around the West often can't communicate directly with each other because they use different types of radios and different frequency bands, said TJ Kennedy, acting general manager of the First Responder Network Authority (FirstNet), which is in charge of making the network a reality.

The systems that first responders use now, including more than 10,000 separate LMRS (land mobile radio system) networks, also fall short of many users' needs. Some public-safety employees have to use their own smartphones in order to use apps, send photos and make calls in the field, according to Kennedy. Once FirstNet's built, all agencies will be able to sign up for the same national service, built on modern mobile broadband technology. It will span not just the 50 states but also U.S. territories, such as Puerto Rico, Guam and the Virgin Islands, and is intended to cover as much land as possible. In some cases that will probably require satellite, but most wireless will go over land-based LTE.

As with any effort to coordinate across 50 states and six territories, spanning about 60,000 public safety agencies, the network won't happen overnight. In fact, FirstNet isn't committing to any precise timeline or budget for getting it done. To give an idea how long the effort might take, there's a 46-step process that has to be carried out for each state and territory. The group is making progress: In many states, it's on step 7, Kennedy said.

That long process is designed to make sure the FirstNet system serves the needs of each state. FirstNet is meeting with local agencies and others involved with the issue, educating them about the technology and finding out what they want out of it.

"The geography and the needs of public safety in Maryland are probably very different from the needs in Alaska," Kennedy said.

Ultimately, each state and territory will choose whether to build the local wireless portion of the network themselves or have FirstNet do it. They can't opt out of the system altogether. Once the wireless infrastructure is in place, individual police departments, fire departments and other agencies will sign up and pay for service on FirstNet in much the same way they now buy service from a commercial mobile operator. FirstNet expects the service to be competitively priced, Kennedy said.

The network itself will be built and operated by carriers or other bidders that respond to FirstNet RFPs (requests for proposals), which will lay out the requirements for the system. Those criteria are still being set.

There's better news on the funding and technology for FirstNet.

Though not all the money is there yet, the funding sources for the system are secure, Kennedy said. The law that authorizes the network says the money to build it will come from three national auctions of wireless spectrum, which are forecast to bring in about US$7 billion. One of those, the so-called H Block auction, has already generated about $1.5 billion. Still to come are the sale of a band called AWS-3 to mobile operators, coming in November, and later the so-called incentive auctions to convert TV frequencies to mobile broadband.

FirstNet is also likely to be an easy fit with other networks and devices. It's designed to run entirely on IP (Internet Protocol), with a fast wired backbone in the core and LTE wireless networks at the edge. Because all the major commercial carriers in the U.S. use LTE, any gear that goes into the network or into first responders' hands can be based on the same mass-produced technologies, keeping costs down.

Unlike current public-safety systems, FirstNet will also have enough bandwidth to carry voice, video and data on mobile devices. The network has been assigned a 20MHz chunk of spectrum in the 700MHz band, comparable to what the major commercial carriers are using in that band. Carriers like 700MHz for its long-reaching signals and ability to penetrate walls.

Some devices on the market already are equipped to use FirstNet's band, and more will follow, Kennedy said. Some other countries have adopted the same band for public safety, most importantly Canada, which shares a continent-wide border with the U.S. This could allow for interoperability between U.S. and Canadian systems if needed, he said.


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Verizon will throttle heaviest LTE data users starting in October

If you have an unlimited data plan with Verizon and use it heavily, here's some bad news: Verizon says it will begin throttling the "top 5 percent" of LTE data users in certain situations starting in October.

Under the new new policy, which was announced in a posting to the Verizon website entitled "Ensuring the Optimal Wireless Experience," the carrier reserves the right to limit 4G LTE data speeds for the heaviest unlimited data users as network conditions dictate.

"While all major wireless carriers employ tools to manage the traffic on their networks, Verizon Wireless uses network intelligence to slow the speeds of only some of its heaviest users on unlimited data plans, and only when those users are connected to a cell site that is experiencing peak usage at that particular time," the post states. "Once the heavy usage eases, or the user moves to a different cell site, the user's speeds return to normal."

Verizon employed a similar policy to limit data speeds for heavy 3G data users under certain circumstances in the past. The carrier also notes that this policy will not impact the vast majority of its users.

While any sort of data-speed throttling isn't ideal for users, Verizon's arrangement of throttling the heaviest users only when the network is congested is arguably a better approach than what some other carriers employ. For example, AT&T throttles unlimited plan users when their monthly data usage exceeds 3GB on 3G and 5GB on LTE, regardless of the network conditions.

Still, when your plan says "unlimited," you expect it to not have any restrictions or strings attached.


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'Canvas fingerprinting' tracking is sneaky but easy to halt

Written By Unknown on Jumat, 25 Juli 2014 | 16.00

A method for tracking users across the Internet called "canvas fingerprinting" is simple to stop, but average Internet users may not know how to do it.

A research paper concluded that code used for canvas fingerprinting had been in use earlier this year on 5,000 or so popular websites, unknown to most. Most but not all the sites observed used a content-sharing widget from the company AddThis.

The researchers, from KU Lueven in Belgium and Princeton University, described how companies are looking for new ways to track users in order to deliver targeted advertising and move away from cookies, which can be easily deleted or blocked.

"The cookie is dead," wrote Rob Shavell, a cofounder of Abine, a company that develops privacy tools, via email. Advertising and data collection businesses need to evidence that their targeting is working for paying clients, he wrote, but most users are unaware of how they're being tracked in new ways.

Following media coverage, AddThis admitted it ran a five-month test using canvas fingerprinting within its widget but said the canvas fingerprinting code was disabled earlier this month. Acknowledging privacy concerns, the company said it would provide more information on such tracking tests before starting one.

It worked like this: When a browser loaded the AddThis widget, JavaScript that enabled canvas fingerprinting was sent. The script used a capability in modern Web browsers called the canvas API that allows access to the computer's graphics chip, which is intended for use with games or other interactive content.

An invisible image was sent to the browser, which rendered it and sent data back to the server. That data can then be used to create a "fingerprint" of the computer, which could be useful for identifying the computer and serving targeted advertisements.

But of several emerging tracking methods, canvas fingerprinting isn't the greatest: it's not terribly accurate, and can be blocked.

Canvas fingerprinting may work best on smaller websites with stable communities, wrote Wladimir Palant, creator of AdBlock Plus browser extension, in a blog post. But it is less effective on a larger scale.

"As soon as you start talking about millions of users (e.g. if you want to track users across multiple websites) it is just too likely that different users will have exactly the same configuration and won't be distinguishable by means of canvas fingerprinting," he wrote.

Widgets such as AddThis can be entirely blocked with tools such as AdBlock Plus or DoNotTrackMe from Abine, both extensions that can block web trackers.

DoNotTrackMe, for example, can spot a browser making a request to AddThis for content and block it, meaning AddThis couldn't transmit JavaScript for canvas fingerprinting, wrote Andrew Sudbury, CTO and cofounder of Abine, via email.

AdBlock Plus can also block these kinds of JavaScript requests, but not by default, wrote Ben Williams, public relations manager for AdBlock Plus, in an email.

The extension is intended to be used with a series of filters, or lists, that enable certain kinds of blocking. Williams wrote that a user would need to install the EasyPrivacy filter. The AddThis widget would be blocked, along with any other JavaScript, he wrote.


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New guide aims to remove the drama of reporting software flaws

Handling a software flaw can be messy, both for a security researcher who found it and for the company it affects. But a new set of guidelines aims to make that interaction less mysterious and confrontational.

Large companies such as Facebook, Google and Yahoo have well defined "responsible disclosure" policies that lay out what is expected of researchers if they find a vulnerability and often the terms under which a reward will be paid.

But many companies don't, which can lead to problems and confusion. Security researchers have occasionally been referred to law enforcement even when they have been up front about the issue with a company.

The guidelines were developed by Bugcrowd, which has a platform companies can use to have their applications analyzed by independent researchers in a safe way and in some cases, reward them. Bugcrowd worked on the framework with CipherLaw, a legal firm specializing in technology.

They've released a short and lucid document on Github describing how companies should approach setting up a responsible disclosure program as well a boilerplate disclosure policy that can be included on a company's website.

The framework "is designed to quickly and smoothly prepare your organization to work with the independent security researcher community while reducing the legal risks to researchers and companies," according to an introduction on Github.


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Apple faces privacy suit following Chinese TV report

An iPhone user has filed a lawsuit for invasion of privacy against Apple, about a week after a Chinese state broadcaster raised security concerns about the device's location-tracking functions.

The U.S. class action lawsuit, filed by a woman named Chen Ma, alleges that Apple has "intentionally intruded" into her privacy with the iPhone's location tracking service. Apple has also disclosed the data to third parties, including the U.S. government, according to the claims.

In making the allegations, the lawsuit cites a July 11 report from the state-run China Central Television, which warned that Apple's location-tracking functions could be a security threat.

The function in question was the "Frequent Locations" feature found on iOS 7. The service records the places the user has visited, along with the duration, and is meant to provide tips, including nearby shops of interest and estimated commute times.

The CCTV report, however, claimed that the feature could be used to effectively spy on users. The data could reveal information about China's economy, and state secrets, according to one security researcher interviewed in the report.

Shortly after CCTV's investigation, Apple released its own statement, assuring users that the company does not track users' locations. Nor does it have access to the Frequent Locations function on users' phones, or has worked with any government agency to create backdoors in its products, it added.

Apple on Friday declined to comment about the class action lawsuit. The complaint was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, San Jose division.


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Facebook isn't giving up on search

Written By Unknown on Kamis, 24 Juli 2014 | 16.00

Facebook reported Wednesday that it now handles an average of more than 1 billion searches a day, but it still has work to do to provide a comprehensive search tool.

Early last year, Facebook unveiled an ambitious search project called Graph Search. The feature was conceived to index the people on Facebook, their posts and the connections between them, to provide a personalized search tool based around people's social networks. It would allow for searches on a variety of topics pertaining to places, people, interests and other topics.

When it was announced at Facebook's headquarters in California, CEO Mark Zuckerberg described it as a way to make Facebook more useful by providing more answers to questions and helping to encourage new connections among members.

Facebook launched Graph Search in 2013, but the company would concede it has a ways to go to index all the content on its site.

It's not quite there yet. On Wednesday, Zuckerberg said Facebook is still a ways off from indexing the range of content on its site. And it's probably even further from making it easily searchable.

"Search for Facebook is going to be a multi-year voyage," Zuckerberg said during a conference call with financial analysts, coming off Facebook's second-quarter earnings announcement. "There's just so much content that's unique to the Facebook ecosystem," he said.

With Graph Search, Facebook started with indexing people. But the company's now working more on indexing the trillion-plus connections among them, as well as their posts, Zuckerberg said.

Ultimately, with this indexing, Facebook wants to give people answers to questions they can't get anywhere else, Zuckerberg said. As an example, the CEO said that the other day he was curious which of his friend's friends worked at a certain company.

Graph Search currently is only available on the desktop version of Facebook. It will let you ask questions such as "Restaurants in Denver, Colorado, my friends like," or "Friends who like to ski." The results, of course, will depend on what information your connections have shared.

Facebook has big competitors in search, the obvious one being Google. Google does not break out its daily searches, but it does handle more than 100 billion a month, according to the company. Graph Search's promised functions would also compete with services offered by Yelp, LinkedIn, Foursquare, and even upstarts like Jelly.

But with well over 1 billion active users, Facebook has a lot of data to use for a search tool.


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EBay faces class action suit over data breach

EBay faces a class action suit in a U.S. federal court over a security breach earlier this year.

The consumer privacy class action lawsuit, filed Wednesday by Collin Green, a citizen of the state of Louisiana, alleged that the security breach was the result of eBay's inadequate security in regard to protecting identity information of its millions of customers.

The e-commerce site's failure to properly secure the information "has caused, and is continuing to cause, damage to its customers, the putative class members herein," according to the complaint by Green which asks for class action status.

EBay informed users in May that it was aware of unauthorized access to eBay systems that may have exposed some customer information. The company said there was no evidence that financial data was compromised. The company subsequently advised users to change their eBay passwords as the attack compromised a database containing eBay user passwords.

"The thieves had access to, and reportedly copied, customer names, encrypted passwords, email addresses, physical addresses, phone numbers, and dates of birth, at a minimum," according to the lawsuit filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Louisiana.

The company did not immediately notify its customers when it first became aware of the February 2014 security breach and instead waited to inform customers until after the news had leaked out of the company, according to the complaint. "eBay's profit-driven decision to withhold the fact of its security lapse further damaged the class members who were prevented from immediately mitigating the damages from the theft," it said, while blaming eBay for not adequately securing the data.

EBay could not be immediately reached for comment.

Green, on behalf of himself and others similarly situated, has asked for a jury trial. The combined claims of the proposed class members exceed US$5 million exclusive of interest and costs.


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More AT&T customers switch to paying for their phones

A majority of AT&T's new smartphone customers are now choosing a plan where they pay for their phones over time, helping to drive strong second-quarter financial results, the carrier said.

Under the AT&T Next plan, introduced last July, subscribers make monthly device payments and can switch to a new phone model once a year. That saves AT&T from having to subsidize the phone, something U.S. mobile operators have done for years at great cost. Interest in Next is accelerating, making up more than 50 percent of the carrier's smartphone additions and plan upgrades in the second quarter.

AT&T Next and multiple-device, shared-data plans also led subscribers to buy and use more mobile data, the carrier said. Just over half of its postpaid customers are on AT&T Mobile Share plans, and 49 percent of those accounts have signed up for 10GB per month or more.

As consumers shifted how they pay for their phones, AT&T brought in less revenue from mobile services in the quarter but far more from selling devices. It expects even more customers to move away from subsidized plans over the rest of the year, executives said on a conference call Wednesday.

That's good for business, AT&T says. The company gained more than 1 million postpaid wireless subscribers in the quarter, its biggest gain in almost five years. Current customers also stuck around: Postpaid churn, or customer turnover, was just 0.86 percent, the second-lowest figure in the history of U.S. mobile operators, according to Ralph de la Vega, president and CEO of AT&T Mobility.

The carrier's LTE network now reaches more than 290 million U.S. residents and should be substantially completed by the end of the summer, de la Vega said.

In its wireline business, AT&T gained 488,000 subscribers to its U-Verse High-Speed Broadband service during the quarter. About 70 percent of the company's broadband customers subscribe to that service now. AT&T's planned acquisition of satellite service provider DirecTV, which is still pending regulatory approvals, is proceeding on schedule, the company said. That deal will help AT&T bundle video, voice and data services together for more customers, Chief Financial Officer John Stephens said. "Service bundles are a proven winner for us," he said.

AT&T's overall revenue for the quarter was $32.6 billion, up 1.6 percent from a year earlier. Earnings per share declined to $0.68 from $0.71, but the company stood by its forecast for higher revenue and earnings per share for the full year.


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Seafaring robot shrugs off monster Typhoon Rammasun

Written By Unknown on Rabu, 23 Juli 2014 | 16.01

It was a storm that would terrify the bravest of mariners, but a California robot swam through it without blinking.

The Wave Glider robot has weathered a direct onslaught by Typhoon Rammasun, battling 9-meter waves and gusts up to 216 kilometers per hour while gathering data on sea surface conditions, maker Liquid Robotics said Tuesday.

The surface robot, which slowly bobs through ocean waves at about walking speed, was remotely piloted through the storm on the South China Sea. The robot has a propulsion system that uses the motion of waves to move it forward.

Rammasun, the strongest typhoon to batter the region in decades, has left over 150 people dead in the Philippines, Vietnam and China, as well as hundreds of millions of U.S. dollars in damage. Typhoons, hurricanes and cyclones refer to the same kind of ocean storm depending on its location in the Pacific, Atlantic or Indian oceans.

"To our knowledge, this is the most powerful storm that a Wave Glider or any other sea robotic system has weathered successfully at the sea surface," Graham Hine, senior vice president at Sunnyvale-based Liquid Robotics, said in an interview.

"Interestingly, the telemetry shows no degradation of the system, so all of the sensing systems and vehicle performance seem to be nominal."

The robot in question will be recovered in about a week and was deployed for a corporate customer of Liquid Robotics, which has over 250 Wave Gliders deployed around the world.

Wave Gliders have sensors to measure oceanographic conditions such as the speed and direction of winds and currents, temperature, wave action and barometric pressure. They also have satellite, cellular and even Wi-Fi communications capabilities for data transmission.

The machines can swim the seas and collect data for months on end. Some have been recovered with embedded shark teeth, jellyfish tentacles and other evidence of encounters with marine life.

In 2012, an autonomously navigating Wave Glider launched in San Francisco reached Australia after a record-setting 16,600-km trek across the Pacific Ocean, demonstrating the technology could survive the high seas.

Liquid Robotics believes that the information gathered by the other robot's passage through Rammasun will complement predictions of how and when typhoons and hurricanes make landfall.

"The hope is that by getting more measurements at the sea surface and really understanding how the energy is transferred from the sea water to the air and vice versa is pretty critical to being able to predict the intensity of the hurricane when it hits shore," Hine said.


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Apple hit with class action lawsuit for alleged labor rule violations

Apple faces in a state court in California a class action suit that its employees were not provided timely meal breaks, rest breaks and final paychecks, according to the lawyer for the employees.

The Superior Court of California for the County of San Diego certified the case as a class action in a suit filed by Apple's retail and corporate employees, said Tyler J. Belong, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, on Tuesday.

Judge Ronald S. Prager appointed the plaintiffs and their counsel Hogue & Belong as class representatives and counsel on behalf of close to 21,000 employees.

Apple now faces claims of meal period, rest period and final pay violations affecting the current and former Apple employees, as a result of the ruling, Belong wrote in an email explaining the court decision.

The violations are said to have happened between December 2007 to August 2012. Apple changed its meal and rest period policy in August 2012, about eight months after the suit was filed, Judge Prager wrote in his order on Monday.

The judge said that a class action was the only feasible method to "fairly and efficiently adjudicate" the claims in a case where the costs of litigating are high for the individual while potential recovery per individual is low.

Rather than having over 20,995 lawsuits or hearings before the Labor Commissioner on the same claims alleged in the action, a class action would allow all individual actions to be resolved once on behalf of all claimants, he added.

The complaint under the California Labor Code was filed in December 2011 by Brandon Felczer and others on behalf of themselves and others similarly situated, who sustained injuries or damages as a result of Apple's alleged violation of the wage and hour laws in California.

Apple was not immediately available for comment. It reported quarterly earnings earlier on Tuesday.


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Google has to face US privacy suit over new user data policy

A California court has allowed a privacy class action suit against Google to continue, though only in part.

After evaluating each claim of each sub-class in the suit, Magistrate Judge Paul S. Grewal has allowed two claims of the "Android Application Disclosure Subclass," which includes all persons and entities in the U.S. that acquired an Android-powered device between Aug. 19, 2004 and the present, and downloaded at least one Android application through the Android Market or Google Play.

On March 1, 2012, Google introduced a single, unified policy that allows the company to comingle user data across accounts and disclose it to third-parties for advertising purposes.

This move triggered the class action lawsuit in March, 2012 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, San Jose division, which argued that by switching to the less-restrictive privacy policy without user consent, Google violated both its prior policies and consumers' privacy rights, according to court records.

The Android Application Disclosure Subclass claimed Google's disclosures to third parties caused increased battery and bandwidth consumption as well as invasions of their statutory and common law privacy rights.

The suit was filed over two years ago and since then the court twice dismissed the plaintiffs' claims. Google moved for a third dismissal.

The claims allowed by the judge includes a breach of contract claim that Google breached terms of the contract by disclosing user data to third parties following every download or purchase of an app, resulting in damages in the form of resource consumption. The second claim is under California's Unfair Competition Law.

Claims by persons and entities in the U.S. that acquired an Android-powered device between May 1, 2010 and Feb. 29, 2012 and switched to a non-Android device on or after March 1, 2012 were dismissed.

Google could not be immediately reached for comment.


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Goodwill Industries investigates suspected payment card breach

Written By Unknown on Selasa, 22 Juli 2014 | 16.00

Goodwill Industries International said Monday federal authorities are investigating a possible payment card breach at its U.S.-based retail outlets.

The nonprofit agency, which sells donated goods to fund employment programs, was notified on Friday, according to a statement from Lauren Lawson-Zilai, Goodwill's director of public relations. The U.S. Secret Service is investigating along with payment card industry fraud units.

A number of large retail companies have been affected by aggressive campaigns by hackers seeking to compromise point-of-sale (POS) terminals, the computerized cash registers that process payment card transactions.

Such systems were involved in data breaches at Target, Neiman Marcus and Michaels. In those cases, malicious software was installed on the terminals and collected payment card details.

Other companies, including P.F. Chang's China Bistro and Sally Beauty, have disclosed data breaches but not detailed what lead to the losses.

The successful attacks against POS systems have taken place despite a years-long campaign to ensure payment card systems are well protected against attacks.

Visa and MasterCard mandate that merchants follow the Payment Card Industry's Data Security Standard (PCI-DSS), a lengthy set of recommendations for security payment processing systems. Still, the systems are complicated, and simple configurations errors can be capitalized on by hackers.

Goodwill said it planned to take "prompt and appropriate actions" if a breach is discovered.

"Goodwills across the country take the data of consumers seriously and their community well-being is our number one concern," it said.


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BrandPost: How private NAS beats the public cloud for small business

The public cloud offers extra features like automated offsite backup – but did you know you can get these things and more with a private cloud solution as well? Here's a look at three ways private NAS setups are becoming a preferable option for small businesses.

Opening the Door for Affordable Virtualization Services

NAS has come a long way since its origin as a system for secure, on-site data storage. Today's NAS devices can serve as platforms for virtualization services that would otherwise require expensive and complex hardware to manage. The opportunity to take advantage of NAS as a more economic alternative to a pricey contract with a company like VMWare is a huge benefit for small businesses. 

QNAP's Virtualization Station allows you to create virtualized desktops that run Windows, Linux, or Unix operating systems and manage them all from one simple interface. You can assign separate network resources to each virtual machine, and create snapshots of each virtual machine's status at any point in time. If a VM experiences a failure, you can quickly roll things back to an earlier environment. The biggest advantages to using NAS for virtualization are cost (virtualization is built right into the NAS) and safety (file transfers are delivered within the LAN, instead of over the Internet). 

Security and Stability You Can Trust

When it comes to ensuring your data is safely stored, it simply doesn't get any better than using a QNAP Turbo NAS. Public cloud services have recently come under fire for breaches caused by hackers and lengthy service outages that have left customers unable to access their data for hours. With a locally hosted NAS device, uptime is no longer a question mark, and your data is always accessible rather than potentially held hostage by the vagaries of the unstable Internet.

Furthermore, your data is always protected by multiple security measures while it resides on your NAS. Sensitive files are encrypted, and unapproved IP addresses are automatically locked out by Turbo NAS software. Integrated antivirus detection (with email notification) and full military-grade encryption on both internally and externally connected hard drives give you excellent all-around protection from security breaches and malware.

NAS Boosts the Benefits of the Public Cloud

Public cloud services like Microsoft Azure and Amazon S3 are convenient ways to add storage on a pay-as-you-go basis. But setting up these services on multiple client computers can be complicated and time-consuming. More importantly, when you're finished, you're left with only a single cloud-based copy of your data as a backup.

With QNAP Turbo NAS, you can use Azure and S3 directly through your own private QNAP hardware. With S3 and Azure - both available as apps for the QNAP Turbo NAS - you simply back up data from your network directly to your Turbo NAS, then use the app to make a secondary backup that's sent to Azure or S3. That way, you maintain a local copy of your data on your own network, and a second copy resides in the public cloud, letting you double down on backup security. These apps even increase your level of data protection through the addition of client-side encryption and the ability to restore accidentally deleted data.

Public cloud and private cloud services can coexist, working hand in hand to ensure your company's data is safer, easier to manage, and faster to access. You can reap the benefits of each by using the public cloud where it makes sense, but leveraging the cost savings and superior speed of a NAS-based private cloud to pull off many of the same tricks more sensibly.


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Black Hat presentation on TOR suddenly cancelled

A presentation on a low-budget method to unmask users of a popular online privacy tool, TOR, will no longer go ahead at the Black Hat security conference early next month.

The talk was nixed by the legal counsel with Carnegie Mellon's Software Engineering Institute after a finding that materials from researcher Alexander Volynkin were not approved for public release, according to a notice on the conference's website.

It's rare but not unprecedented for Black Hat presentations to be cancelled. It was not clear why lawyers felt Volynkin's presentation should not proceed.

Volynkin, a research scientist with the university's Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT) was due to give a talk entitled "You Don't Have to be the NSA to Break Tor: Deanonymizing Users on a Budget" at the conference, which take places Aug. 6-7 in Last Vegas.

TOR is short for The Onion Router, which is a network of distributed nodes that provide greater privacy by encrypting a person's browsing traffic and routing that traffic through random proxy servers. Although originally developed by the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, it is now maintained by The TOR Project.

TOR is widely used by both cybercriminals and those with legitimate interests in preserving their anonymity, such as dissidents and journalists. Although TOR masks a computer's true IP address, advanced attacks have been developed that undermine its effectiveness.

Some of Volynkin's materials were informally shared with The TOR Project, a nonprofit group that oversees the TOR, wrote Roger Dingledine, a co-founder of the organization, in mailing list post on Monday.

The TOR Project did not request the talk to be canceled, Dingledine wrote. Also, the group has not received slides or descriptions of Volynkin's talk that go beyond an abstract that has now been deleted from Black Hat's website.

Dingledine wrote that The TOR Project is working with CERT to do a coordinated disclosure around Volynkin's findings, possibly later this week. In general, the group encourages researchers to responsibly disclose information about new attacks.

"Researchers who have told us about bugs in the past have found us pretty helpful in fixing issues and generally positive to work with," Dingledine wrote.


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PCWorld

Written By Unknown on Senin, 21 Juli 2014 | 16.01

Things always live fast and die young in the blink-and-you'll-miss world of consumer technology, but the past week was an especially brutal one for a wide range of devices and services. Killed products topped the headlines on an daily basis—many, but not all, stemming from Microsoft's plan to cut 18,000 jobs, including half (yes, half) of the Nokia staff it so recently acquired.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

]]> http://www.pcworld.com/article/2455967/dead-devices-and-shuttered-services-techs-no-good-very-bad-week.html#tk.rss_all Hardware Windows Tablets Sat, 19 Jul 2014 04:00:00 -0700 Hayden Dingman Hayden Dingman

"We enjoy killing the player," says Karl Roelofs, a fiendish grin lighting up his face.

Roelofs and his friend Dave Marsh were responsible for creating Shadowgate, one of the earliest graphical point-and-click adventure gamess, for the Macintosh way back in 1987. Now, a quarter of a century later and with the help of some 3,500 Kickstarter backers, Roelofs and Marsh are returning to the dark halls of Castle Shadowgate.

"A few years ago when Doublefine was getting the ground going with retro games on Kickstarter Dave and I looked at each other and said, 'Why not? Why not do Shadowgate right?'" says Roelofs.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

]]> http://www.pcworld.com/article/2454552/shadowgate-preview-inside-the-modern-rebirth-of-a-point-and-click-adventure-classic.html#tk.rss_all Gaming Games Fri, 18 Jul 2014 13:55:13 -0700 Juan Carlos Perez, IDG News Service Juan Carlos Perez, IDG News Service

Microsoft has been screaming "cloud" in many partners' deaf ears for several years, but the company found a more receptive audience at this week's Worldwide Partner Conference.

From CEO Satya Nadella on down, all Microsoft officials at the event told attendees that they need to switch their businesses to the cloud urgently, or else risk obsolescence and market defeat.

"You need to get on this train. This market is being made now," a vehement and adrenaline-drenched Kevin Turner—Microsoft's COO—said during a WPC keynote, adding that Microsoft doesn't have enough partners selling its cloud services anywhere in the world.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

]]> http://www.pcworld.com/article/2456200/cloud-message-resonating-with-microsoft-partners.html#tk.rss_all Software Cloud & Services Fri, 18 Jul 2014 13:52:00 -0700 Brad Chacos Brad Chacos

Chrome evangelist François Beaufort gave us a glimpse of the potential future of Chrome OS on Friday, and boy is it ugly.

Maybe that's a bit harsh. The lone screenshot Beaufort provided of the "Athena project" is clearly in its early days; the developer fully warns that the Chromium team is still experimenting with it. "The first draft consists in a collection of windows with some simple window management," he wrote on Google+.

Even so, it's hard to look at.

chrome os athena

The first look at Project Athena for Chrome OS mashes up Material Design with the feel of Apple's Time Machine. (Click to enlarge.)

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

]]> http://www.pcworld.com/article/2455151/google-reveals-athena-a-material-design-inspired-revamp-of-chrome-os.html#tk.rss_all Chromebooks Operating Systems Fri, 18 Jul 2014 13:35:13 -0700 Stephen Lawson Stephen Lawson

A breakthrough by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology could change the way Web and mobile apps are written and help companies like Facebook keep the cat videos coming.

Their main innovation is a new way to decide when each packet can scurry across a data center to its destination. The software that the MIT team developed, called Fastpass, uses parallel computing to make those decisions almost as soon as the packets arrive at each switch. They think Fastpass may show up in production data centers in about two years.

In today's networks, packets can spend a lot of their time in big, memory-intensive queues, lined up like tourists at Disney World. That's because switches mostly decide on their own when each packet can go on to its destination, and they do so with limited information. Fastpass gives that job to a central server, called an arbiter, that can look at a whole segment of the data center and schedule packets in a more efficient way, according to Hari Balakrishnan, MIT's Fujitsu Professor in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. He co-wrote a paper that will be presented at an Association for Computing Machinery conference next month. The co-authors included Facebook researcher Hans Fugal.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

]]> http://www.pcworld.com/article/2456180/mit-invention-to-speed-up-data-centers-should-cheer-developers.html#tk.rss_all Networking Fri, 18 Jul 2014 13:25:17 -0700 Grant Gross Grant Gross

The U.S government can take action to slow the calls in other countries to abandon U.S. tech vendors following revelations about widespread National Security Agency surveillance, some tech representatives said Friday.

Decisions by other governments to move their residents' data away from the U.S. are hurting tech vendors, but Congress can take steps to "rebuild the trust" in the U.S. as a responsible Internet leader, said Kevin Bankston, policy director of the New America Foundation's Open Technology Institute.

Still, other governments will continue to try to use the NSA revelations by former agency contractor Edward Snowden to their advantage, said panelists at a Congressional Internet Caucus discussion on the effect of NSA surveillance on U.S. businesses.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

]]> http://www.pcworld.com/article/2456163/us-needs-to-restore-trust-following-nsa-revelations-tech-groups-say.html#tk.rss_all Government Networking Security Privacy Fri, 18 Jul 2014 13:25:15 -0700 Marc Ferranti Marc Ferranti

With Google, IBM, SAP, Intel and other tech titans reporting earnings this week, the focus is again on mobile and cloud technology. The general trend appears to be that the further a tech vendor has moved away from its legacy desktop-oriented products, the better its earnings are.

IBM has launched ambitious cloud and mobile initiatives—but the resulting products are not quite fully baked. IBM officials themselves acknowledge as much, with IBM CEO Ginni Rometty talking about "positioning ourselves for growth over the long term" in the company's earnings release Thursday.

Earlier this year, IBM announced a global competition to encourage developers to create mobile consumer and business apps powered by its Watson supercomputer platform. Just this week, IBM and Apple said they are teaming up to create business apps for Apple's mobile phones and tablets.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

]]> http://www.pcworld.com/article/2456160/wall-street-beat-transition-to-mobile-cloud-hits-tech-earnings.html#tk.rss_all Business Issues Fri, 18 Jul 2014 13:20:00 -0700 Agam Shah Agam Shah
Refunds for returned products will be issued in real currency

My sides are so sore from laughing. The video game industry lost its collective minds this week and decided to deliver unto you the most ridiculous set of news possible. Seriously, we've got an infamous dictator suing over misuse of his image, Flappy Bird running on an Apple IIe, and Fred Durst streaming video games on Twitch in between recording vocal tracks for a new Limp Bizkit album. Surely this is the end of days—as evidenced by the reveal of a new Doom game.

Here's all the video game news for the week of July 14. I'll leave out the "fit to print" part this week.

It'll never stop

That Flappy Bird port train just keeps on chugging. Developer Dagen Brock ported the game to the Apple II this week, thereby causing a rift in the space-time continuum and unleashing the hordes of demons waiting just outside the fabric of our world.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

In case the headline didn't tip you off: Yep, you can buy Dell products with Bitcoin now, as Michael Dell himself proudly trumpeted on Twitter earlier today.

System administrators take note: That mobile employee expense app you're building should be every bit as easy to use as Facebook. Oh, and you better deliver it quickly too, because that's how Facebook rolls.

Increasingly, organizations are finding that they need to build mobile apps for their employees in this hyper-connected world. Because employees are probably already used to Twitter, Facebook, Google Maps and other consumer-friendly apps, they'll expect a high degree of polish and performance from their enterprise apps as well.

"As consumers become more familiar with mobile experiences, they are bringing those expectations into the enterprise and expecting the enterprises to move just as fast," said Jeff Haynie, co-founder and CEO of Appcelerator, which offers a set of software and services for building, testing and managing mobile applications.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

I wrote yesterday about a report from Microsoft researchers, which goes against established password security best practices. The new guidance from the Microsoft researchers makes sense to me, because it fits how I handle password management already. However, at least one security expert feels that there is a fatal flaw that makes the new password advice impractical: You.

Almost every aspect of computer security and privacy seems to come back to that one fundamental issue. You—the user—are the weakest link in the security chain. No matter how effective a security process or tool has the potential to be, user error can undermine the whole thing and render the security useless.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Plans to favor some Internet packets over others threaten consumers' hard-won right to use encryption, a digital privacy advocate says.

Activists and tech companies fended off efforts in the U.S. in the 1990s to ban Internet encryption or give the government ways around it, but an even bigger battle over cryptography is brewing now, according to Sascha Meinrath, director of X-Lab, a digital civil-rights think tank launched earlier this year. One of the most contested issues in that battle will be net neutrality, Meinrath said.

The new fight will be even more fierce than the last one, because Internet service providers now see dollars and cents in the details of packets traversing their networks. They want to charge content providers for priority delivery of their packets across the network, something that a controversial Federal Communications Commission proposal could allow under certain conditions. Friday is the filing deadline for the first round of public comments on that plan.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Editor's note: This article was originally published 7/17/14 but was updated 7/18/14 with NPD's sales numbers for the PlayStation 4.

We're still waiting on the NPD research group to release its monthly console sales estimates later today (see update at bottom --ed.), but Microsoft got so excited last night that it couldn't wait any longer, showering in confetti and those little popper things where you pull on the string and they explode—people are finally buying the Xbox One!

"Since the new Xbox One offering launched on June 9th, we've seen sales of Xbox One more than double in the US, compared to sales in May," Microsoft wrote in a blog post. The "new Xbox One offering" refers, of course, to the model where they stripped out the controversial Kinect peripheral and dropped the price from $500 to a more competitive $400.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

One of the best features of Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 is the ability to pin apps to the Taskbar. Until Microsoft comes out with the refreshed Start menu, pinning apps is a must for Windows 8.1 users.

As the go-to location for dealing with and switching between open programs, the Taskbar may be the most clickable location on your desktop. But there's no reason you can't spice it up with a few keyboard tricks to make things a little more efficient.

Pick by number

If you have a bunch of apps pinned to your taskbar, the keyboard offers a quick way to fire up or switch to a program without reaching for your mouse.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Researchers are gearing up to hack an array of different home routers during a contest next month at the Defcon 22 security conference.

The contest is called SOHOpelessly Broken—a nod to the small office/home office space targeted by the products—and follows a growing number of large scale attacks this year against routers and other home embedded systems.

The competition is organized by security consultancy firm Independent Security Evaluators and advocacy group the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), and will have two separate challenges.

The first challenge, known as Track 0, will require researchers to demonstrate exploits for previously unknown, or zero-day, vulnerabilities in a number of popular off-the-shelf consumer wireless routers.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

As Microsoft looks to slim down with layoffs and restructuring, Nokia is spinning MixRadio into a separate steaming music company.

While the app will still come preloaded on Windows Phones, it will also come to Android and iOS, according to The Guardian. There's no word on when the spin-off will be finalized, or when the apps will become available on other platforms.

It's also unclear whether MixRadio will look to include ads in its app now that it's no longer an exclusive perk for Nokia phone owners. Currently, the app is ad-free, but users can get higher audio quality, offline listening and unlimited song skipping for $4 per month.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

]]> http://www.pcworld.com/article/2455962/downsizing-microsoft-to-spin-off-nokias-mixradio-music-service.html#tk.rss_all Fri, 18 Jul 2014 08:00:00 -0700 Ian Paul Ian Paul

Dropbox is a very popular cloud storage service, but NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden is no fan. In a recent interview with The Guardian, Snowden called Dropbox a "targeted, wannabe PRISM partner" that is "very hostile to privacy."

Snowden also isn't happy about Dropbox's decision in April to add former U.S. Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice to its Board of Directors. Snowden called Rice "probably the most anti-privacy official you can imagine."

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

]]> http://www.pcworld.com/article/2455215/edward-snowden-dropbox-is-hostile-to-privacy.html#tk.rss_all Privacy Storage Cloud & Services Fri, 18 Jul 2014 07:23:00 -0700 Jared Newman Jared Newman Amazon's new subscription e-book plan includes more than 600,000 titles, but no major publishers. http://www.techhive.com/article/2455114/kindle-unlimited-launches-600-000-all-you-can-read-e-books-for-10-per-month.html#tk.rss_all Books software Fri, 18 Jul 2014 07:05:11 -0700 Lucian Constantin Lucian Constantin

Romanian and French authorities have dismantled a cybercriminal network that infected computers at money transfer outlets across Europe and used them to perform illegal transactions.

The gang was also involved in the theft of credit card details through skimming, credit card cloning, money laundering and drug trafficking, Europol announced Thursday.

The gang, which was composed mostly of Romanian citizens, infected computers at copy shops that also operated as money transfer franchises in Austria, Belgium, Germany, Norway, the U.K. and other European countries. No details were released about how the computers were infected, but Europol said that the attackers used a remote access Trojan (RAT) program.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

]]> http://www.pcworld.com/article/2455940/romanian-gang-used-malware-to-defraud-international-money-transfer-firms.html#tk.rss_all Security Legal

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PCWorld

Written By Unknown on Minggu, 20 Juli 2014 | 16.00

Things always live fast and die young in the blink-and-you'll-miss world of consumer technology, but the past week was an especially brutal one for a wide range of devices and services. Killed products topped the headlines on an daily basis—many, but not all, stemming from Microsoft's plan to cut 18,000 jobs, including half (yes, half) of the Nokia staff it so recently acquired.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

]]> http://www.pcworld.com/article/2455967/dead-devices-and-shuttered-services-techs-no-good-very-bad-week.html#tk.rss_all Hardware Windows Tablets Sat, 19 Jul 2014 04:00:00 -0700 Hayden Dingman Hayden Dingman

"We enjoy killing the player," says Karl Roelofs, a fiendish grin lighting up his face.

Roelofs and his friend Dave Marsh were responsible for creating Shadowgate, one of the earliest graphical point-and-click adventure gamess, for the Macintosh way back in 1987. Now, a quarter of a century later and with the help of some 3,500 Kickstarter backers, Roelofs and Marsh are returning to the dark halls of Castle Shadowgate.

"A few years ago when Doublefine was getting the ground going with retro games on Kickstarter Dave and I looked at each other and said, 'Why not? Why not do Shadowgate right?'" says Roelofs.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

]]> http://www.pcworld.com/article/2454552/shadowgate-preview-inside-the-modern-rebirth-of-a-point-and-click-adventure-classic.html#tk.rss_all Gaming Games Fri, 18 Jul 2014 13:55:13 -0700 Juan Carlos Perez, IDG News Service Juan Carlos Perez, IDG News Service

Microsoft has been screaming "cloud" in many partners' deaf ears for several years, but the company found a more receptive audience at this week's Worldwide Partner Conference.

From CEO Satya Nadella on down, all Microsoft officials at the event told attendees that they need to switch their businesses to the cloud urgently, or else risk obsolescence and market defeat.

"You need to get on this train. This market is being made now," a vehement and adrenaline-drenched Kevin Turner—Microsoft's COO—said during a WPC keynote, adding that Microsoft doesn't have enough partners selling its cloud services anywhere in the world.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

]]> http://www.pcworld.com/article/2456200/cloud-message-resonating-with-microsoft-partners.html#tk.rss_all Software Cloud & Services Fri, 18 Jul 2014 13:52:00 -0700 Brad Chacos Brad Chacos

Chrome evangelist François Beaufort gave us a glimpse of the potential future of Chrome OS on Friday, and boy is it ugly.

Maybe that's a bit harsh. The lone screenshot Beaufort provided of the "Athena project" is clearly in its early days; the developer fully warns that the Chromium team is still experimenting with it. "The first draft consists in a collection of windows with some simple window management," he wrote on Google+.

Even so, it's hard to look at.

chrome os athena

The first look at Project Athena for Chrome OS mashes up Material Design with the feel of Apple's Time Machine. (Click to enlarge.)

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

]]> http://www.pcworld.com/article/2455151/google-reveals-athena-a-material-design-inspired-revamp-of-chrome-os.html#tk.rss_all Chromebooks Operating Systems Fri, 18 Jul 2014 13:35:13 -0700 Stephen Lawson Stephen Lawson

A breakthrough by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology could change the way Web and mobile apps are written and help companies like Facebook keep the cat videos coming.

Their main innovation is a new way to decide when each packet can scurry across a data center to its destination. The software that the MIT team developed, called Fastpass, uses parallel computing to make those decisions almost as soon as the packets arrive at each switch. They think Fastpass may show up in production data centers in about two years.

In today's networks, packets can spend a lot of their time in big, memory-intensive queues, lined up like tourists at Disney World. That's because switches mostly decide on their own when each packet can go on to its destination, and they do so with limited information. Fastpass gives that job to a central server, called an arbiter, that can look at a whole segment of the data center and schedule packets in a more efficient way, according to Hari Balakrishnan, MIT's Fujitsu Professor in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. He co-wrote a paper that will be presented at an Association for Computing Machinery conference next month. The co-authors included Facebook researcher Hans Fugal.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

]]> http://www.pcworld.com/article/2456180/mit-invention-to-speed-up-data-centers-should-cheer-developers.html#tk.rss_all Networking Fri, 18 Jul 2014 13:25:17 -0700 Grant Gross Grant Gross

The U.S government can take action to slow the calls in other countries to abandon U.S. tech vendors following revelations about widespread National Security Agency surveillance, some tech representatives said Friday.

Decisions by other governments to move their residents' data away from the U.S. are hurting tech vendors, but Congress can take steps to "rebuild the trust" in the U.S. as a responsible Internet leader, said Kevin Bankston, policy director of the New America Foundation's Open Technology Institute.

Still, other governments will continue to try to use the NSA revelations by former agency contractor Edward Snowden to their advantage, said panelists at a Congressional Internet Caucus discussion on the effect of NSA surveillance on U.S. businesses.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

]]> http://www.pcworld.com/article/2456163/us-needs-to-restore-trust-following-nsa-revelations-tech-groups-say.html#tk.rss_all Government Networking Security Privacy Fri, 18 Jul 2014 13:25:15 -0700 Marc Ferranti Marc Ferranti

With Google, IBM, SAP, Intel and other tech titans reporting earnings this week, the focus is again on mobile and cloud technology. The general trend appears to be that the further a tech vendor has moved away from its legacy desktop-oriented products, the better its earnings are.

IBM has launched ambitious cloud and mobile initiatives—but the resulting products are not quite fully baked. IBM officials themselves acknowledge as much, with IBM CEO Ginni Rometty talking about "positioning ourselves for growth over the long term" in the company's earnings release Thursday.

Earlier this year, IBM announced a global competition to encourage developers to create mobile consumer and business apps powered by its Watson supercomputer platform. Just this week, IBM and Apple said they are teaming up to create business apps for Apple's mobile phones and tablets.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

]]> http://www.pcworld.com/article/2456160/wall-street-beat-transition-to-mobile-cloud-hits-tech-earnings.html#tk.rss_all Business Issues Fri, 18 Jul 2014 13:20:00 -0700 Agam Shah Agam Shah
Refunds for returned products will be issued in real currency

My sides are so sore from laughing. The video game industry lost its collective minds this week and decided to deliver unto you the most ridiculous set of news possible. Seriously, we've got an infamous dictator suing over misuse of his image, Flappy Bird running on an Apple IIe, and Fred Durst streaming video games on Twitch in between recording vocal tracks for a new Limp Bizkit album. Surely this is the end of days—as evidenced by the reveal of a new Doom game.

Here's all the video game news for the week of July 14. I'll leave out the "fit to print" part this week.

It'll never stop

That Flappy Bird port train just keeps on chugging. Developer Dagen Brock ported the game to the Apple II this week, thereby causing a rift in the space-time continuum and unleashing the hordes of demons waiting just outside the fabric of our world.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

In case the headline didn't tip you off: Yep, you can buy Dell products with Bitcoin now, as Michael Dell himself proudly trumpeted on Twitter earlier today.

System administrators take note: That mobile employee expense app you're building should be every bit as easy to use as Facebook. Oh, and you better deliver it quickly too, because that's how Facebook rolls.

Increasingly, organizations are finding that they need to build mobile apps for their employees in this hyper-connected world. Because employees are probably already used to Twitter, Facebook, Google Maps and other consumer-friendly apps, they'll expect a high degree of polish and performance from their enterprise apps as well.

"As consumers become more familiar with mobile experiences, they are bringing those expectations into the enterprise and expecting the enterprises to move just as fast," said Jeff Haynie, co-founder and CEO of Appcelerator, which offers a set of software and services for building, testing and managing mobile applications.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

I wrote yesterday about a report from Microsoft researchers, which goes against established password security best practices. The new guidance from the Microsoft researchers makes sense to me, because it fits how I handle password management already. However, at least one security expert feels that there is a fatal flaw that makes the new password advice impractical: You.

Almost every aspect of computer security and privacy seems to come back to that one fundamental issue. You—the user—are the weakest link in the security chain. No matter how effective a security process or tool has the potential to be, user error can undermine the whole thing and render the security useless.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Plans to favor some Internet packets over others threaten consumers' hard-won right to use encryption, a digital privacy advocate says.

Activists and tech companies fended off efforts in the U.S. in the 1990s to ban Internet encryption or give the government ways around it, but an even bigger battle over cryptography is brewing now, according to Sascha Meinrath, director of X-Lab, a digital civil-rights think tank launched earlier this year. One of the most contested issues in that battle will be net neutrality, Meinrath said.

The new fight will be even more fierce than the last one, because Internet service providers now see dollars and cents in the details of packets traversing their networks. They want to charge content providers for priority delivery of their packets across the network, something that a controversial Federal Communications Commission proposal could allow under certain conditions. Friday is the filing deadline for the first round of public comments on that plan.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Editor's note: This article was originally published 7/17/14 but was updated 7/18/14 with NPD's sales numbers for the PlayStation 4.

We're still waiting on the NPD research group to release its monthly console sales estimates later today (see update at bottom --ed.), but Microsoft got so excited last night that it couldn't wait any longer, showering in confetti and those little popper things where you pull on the string and they explode—people are finally buying the Xbox One!

"Since the new Xbox One offering launched on June 9th, we've seen sales of Xbox One more than double in the US, compared to sales in May," Microsoft wrote in a blog post. The "new Xbox One offering" refers, of course, to the model where they stripped out the controversial Kinect peripheral and dropped the price from $500 to a more competitive $400.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

One of the best features of Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 is the ability to pin apps to the Taskbar. Until Microsoft comes out with the refreshed Start menu, pinning apps is a must for Windows 8.1 users.

As the go-to location for dealing with and switching between open programs, the Taskbar may be the most clickable location on your desktop. But there's no reason you can't spice it up with a few keyboard tricks to make things a little more efficient.

Pick by number

If you have a bunch of apps pinned to your taskbar, the keyboard offers a quick way to fire up or switch to a program without reaching for your mouse.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Researchers are gearing up to hack an array of different home routers during a contest next month at the Defcon 22 security conference.

The contest is called SOHOpelessly Broken—a nod to the small office/home office space targeted by the products—and follows a growing number of large scale attacks this year against routers and other home embedded systems.

The competition is organized by security consultancy firm Independent Security Evaluators and advocacy group the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), and will have two separate challenges.

The first challenge, known as Track 0, will require researchers to demonstrate exploits for previously unknown, or zero-day, vulnerabilities in a number of popular off-the-shelf consumer wireless routers.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

As Microsoft looks to slim down with layoffs and restructuring, Nokia is spinning MixRadio into a separate steaming music company.

While the app will still come preloaded on Windows Phones, it will also come to Android and iOS, according to The Guardian. There's no word on when the spin-off will be finalized, or when the apps will become available on other platforms.

It's also unclear whether MixRadio will look to include ads in its app now that it's no longer an exclusive perk for Nokia phone owners. Currently, the app is ad-free, but users can get higher audio quality, offline listening and unlimited song skipping for $4 per month.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

]]> http://www.pcworld.com/article/2455962/downsizing-microsoft-to-spin-off-nokias-mixradio-music-service.html#tk.rss_all Fri, 18 Jul 2014 08:00:00 -0700 Ian Paul Ian Paul

Dropbox is a very popular cloud storage service, but NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden is no fan. In a recent interview with The Guardian, Snowden called Dropbox a "targeted, wannabe PRISM partner" that is "very hostile to privacy."

Snowden also isn't happy about Dropbox's decision in April to add former U.S. Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice to its Board of Directors. Snowden called Rice "probably the most anti-privacy official you can imagine."

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

]]> http://www.pcworld.com/article/2455215/edward-snowden-dropbox-is-hostile-to-privacy.html#tk.rss_all Privacy Storage Cloud & Services Fri, 18 Jul 2014 07:23:00 -0700 Jared Newman Jared Newman Amazon's new subscription e-book plan includes more than 600,000 titles, but no major publishers. http://www.techhive.com/article/2455114/kindle-unlimited-launches-600-000-all-you-can-read-e-books-for-10-per-month.html#tk.rss_all Books software Fri, 18 Jul 2014 07:05:11 -0700 Lucian Constantin Lucian Constantin

Romanian and French authorities have dismantled a cybercriminal network that infected computers at money transfer outlets across Europe and used them to perform illegal transactions.

The gang was also involved in the theft of credit card details through skimming, credit card cloning, money laundering and drug trafficking, Europol announced Thursday.

The gang, which was composed mostly of Romanian citizens, infected computers at copy shops that also operated as money transfer franchises in Austria, Belgium, Germany, Norway, the U.K. and other European countries. No details were released about how the computers were infected, but Europol said that the attackers used a remote access Trojan (RAT) program.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

]]> http://www.pcworld.com/article/2455940/romanian-gang-used-malware-to-defraud-international-money-transfer-firms.html#tk.rss_all Security Legal Fri, 18 Jul 2014 07:00:00 -0700 Loek Essers Loek Essers Apple maintained that its parental controls 'go far beyond the features of others in the industry.' http://www.macworld.com/article/2455880/european-commission-slams-apple-for-in-app-purchase-policies.html#tk.rss_all Government

16.00 | 0 komentar | Read More
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