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