Nike gets into smartwatch software with Samsung Gear S app

Nike is moving from fitness bands to smartwatches with an app for Samsung's upcoming Gear S.

The Nike+ Running app will come pre-loaded on the Gear S, and will put the watch's built-in GPS and cellular connections to good use. While out on a run, users can record their route and check their speed even if they've left their phones at home. The app also has a built-in music player and Facebook connectivity for "real-time cheers" from friends.

Samsung's Gear S is hardly the only wearable with GPS built-in, but that feature is notably absent from other smartwatches, and from some popular fitness bands such as Jawbone Up and Fitbit Flex. Without GPS, fitness bands essentially become step counters, unable to determine speed, pacing or route on their own.

And so far, the Gear S is the only major brand smartwatch with cellular connectivity. The ability to stay connected is useful for fitness applications, where your phone may not be on hand. (It's unclear, however, whether wireless carriers will support standalone smartwatches without charging a fortune for service.)

For Nike, the partnership is part of a bigger focus on software and services, and comes after reports in April claimed that the company would abandon its own fitness band business. Although Nike downplayed the rumors that it's getting out of hardware entirely—and it continues to sell its current line of FuelBand activity trackers—it hasn't denied the change in focus. The Gear S app is the first instance of Nike tapping into third-party wearables, though it may not be the last, with Apple expected to announce its own wearable device in a couple weeks.

Samsung's Gear S, meanwhile, will start a phased rollout in October, though the company hasn't announced specific release dates or pricing.

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IBM Watson cooks up some new dishes

When not busy helping to find new treatments for cancer, IBM Watson is helping to cook up a few new dishes as well.

To show off Watson's powers, IBM is training its cognitive computing system to suggest new combinations of ingredients that could help cooks to create new, and sometimes quite delicious, recipes. It does so by analyzing the chemical compounds in each ingredient.

IBM joined Bon Appétit magazine to create a Web application called Chef Watson, now in beta, that offers lists of ingredients that can be used to create recipes. Bon Appétit is also working up a cookbook of the best Watson-based creations submitted by users.

IBM focused Watson on the culinary world to "help the public understand what these new types of technologies are capable of doing," said Mike Rhodin, IBM senior vice president in the Watson Group, at an event Thursday to promote a new cloud service, called Watson Discovery Advisor. That service can help researchers in any field find fresh connections within vast realms of data.

"Much the same way Jeopardy helped people understand that cognitive systems could understand questions using natural language, Chef Watson helps us understand how these new systems can be used in our everyday lives," Rhodin said.

Tuning Watson to the culinary arts has proved to be a success story for IBM.

Watson "starts building an understanding of what ingredients and compounds work well together, and it then extrapolates and looks for new patterns," Steve Gold, IBM vice president for the Watson platform, said in an interview. "Turns out, Watson is really good at coming up with combinations of ingredients that have never been tried before."

In February, IBM set up a food truck at the SXSW interactive arts conference to show off some Watson-inspired recipes. It drew long lines of hungry attendees.

IBM Research first developed Watson to compete with human contestants on the Jeopardy game show in 2011, using natural language processing and analytics, as well as many sources of structured and unstructured data, to answer the shows questions.

In the years since, the company has been working to commercialize the Watson technology, identifying industries that could benefit from cognitive computing, such as health care, law enforcement and finance.

To help its researchers better understand the culinary arts, IBM paired with the Institute of Culinary Education in New York.

"Working with the system has augmented our creativity as chefs. It changes the whole way we approach our craft in the kitchen," said James Briscione, director of culinary development at the Institute of Culinary Education, speaking at Thursday's event.

Tasteful combinations of ingredients are at the core of good cooking. Some combinations have long been known: A nice piece of fish can be accentuated with some lemon, butter and herbs.

In the culinary arts, chefs often deploy "known combinations" of ingredients and foods, Briscione said. But they're are always looking for new combinations, too, scanning cookbooks and magazines and travelling to exotic locations to taste local foods.

"The challenge in our world is to move to the next step," Briscione said. "We want to push forward and try to find new ways of putting things together."

In the past few years, a trend has been to combine ingredients with complementary aromatic properties, the chemical compounds that produce the flavors people experience.

For example, caviar and white chocolate go really well together, even though one is salty and the other is sweet, because those two ingredients share a lot of aromatic compounds. Tomatoes, mozzarella, and Parmesan cheese share common compounds, making pizza a naturally delicious dish.

Watson puts this new wave of experimentation in overdrive, offering cooks lists of ingredients that may go well together by way of their aromatic properties. The chef can then look for ways to combine the ingredients in novel ways.

Because Watson is a learning machine, it's producing better recipes now than it was at the start of the project 18 months ago, Rhodin said.

"It was a little challenging to work with at first, and now it is making really innovative, incredible and exciting food," Briscione agreed.

For example, working with Watson, the Institute of Culinary Education came up with a Portuguese-inspired lobster roll with saffron, green olives, basil, and shreds of crispy pork. "I never would have set out to put [these ingredients] in a lobster roll," Briscione said. Yet the combination proved to be quite tasty.

Mixed drinks are also game for Watson. For SXSW, the chefs came up with a bourbon cocktail with vanilla, bananas and turmeric. Again, these are not ingredients that have historically been combined, but the Watson matching proved to be "an amazing combination," Briscione said.

Watson-inspired dishes can span different cultures and regions. Another dish the culinary school created was the Vietnamese Apple Kabob, consisting of pineapple, pork, chicken, mushrooms, and strawberries, which all share similar flavor compounds.

"We try to put together combinations of regions and ingredients that make no sense, and we try to make sense out of them," Briscione said.

In much the same way it is helping in cancer research, Watson is proving to be quite the time-saver, suggesting approaches that would take humans too much work to arrive at otherwise.

"Coming upon this information on your own, you'd be locked away for months at a time, digging through chemical analyses and trying to line up all the ingredients, and you still may never get there," Briscione said.

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Facebook says not to believe the rumors, wants you to trust its Messenger app

You've probably read the rumors by now: Facebook's Messenger app records your movements! Spies on your conversations! Kills baby unicorns! Facebook wants you to know that it's doing nothing of the sort.

In a statement from Peter Martinazzi, a member of the Facebook Messenger development team, the social media company explains that Messenger doesn't actively listen in or watch you through your phone's on-board camera and microphone. Instead, it asks to use your camera and microphone so you can make audio chats, or send photos and videos to your friends.

From the statement:

"Like most other apps, we request permission to run certain features, such as making calls and sending photos, videos or voice messages. If you want to send a selfie to a friend, the app needs permission to turn on your phone's camera and capture that photo. We don't turn on your camera or microphone when you aren't using the app."

Martinazzi goes on to explain that the company created the standalone Messenger app to "[provide] a fast, reliable and fun messaging app that anyone in the world can use and that "People usually respond about 20% faster when they have Messenger" compared to messages received through the standard Facebook mobile app.

It probably isn't a bad idea to look upon the company's offerings with a skeptical eye.

Although the specific concerns surrounding Facebook Messenger may have been a little misguided, the fear is completely understandable. After all, Facebook doesn't exactly have a sterling reputation when it comes to respecting users' privacy, and early last year it secretly tinkered with its newsfeed algorithm in the name of science. With that in mind, it probably isn't a bad idea to look upon the company's offerings with a skeptical eye. 

You can, of course, disable or delete your account, and be done with Facebook entirely. 

As for the part about the unicorns, well, I made that up. Just kidding.

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Facebook testing mobile searches for old posts

Facebook is testing a way to let users of its mobile app search for posts shared with them in the past.

The tool is designed to let people find posts that otherwise might get lost in the mix. With the update, users can search for posts they've previously seen on Facebook from friends and the Pages to which they're connected.

People who have access to the update can search for, say, "kayak trip John Smith," and a previous post that the user saw in his or her feed about the trip might pop up.

"We're testing an improvement to search on mobile," a Facebook spokeswoman said. "In this test you can use keywords to search for posts you're in the audience for on Facebook."

Facebook didn't say how many of its billion-plus users have access to the feature.

Search is a mixed bag right now on Facebook's mobile app. You can search for content such as people, companies, places, and interests, but finding specific posts is a difficult, if not fruitless, pursuit.

The test represents a form of search that Facebook has been scaling out already on desktops. Early last year it launched a beta-test version of Graph Search, designed to let people search for many types of content based on their connections.

Facebook has been scaling Graph Search slowly on the desktop. Last September, it was expanded beyond profile content to include posts and status updates.

The usefulness of its search tools depends on Facebook's ability to index the vast amount of content people post. CEO Mark Zuckerberg has called search a multi-year voyage for the company.

News of the test was first reported on Thursday by Bloomberg.

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Nike gets into smartwatch software with Samsung Gear S app

Nike is moving from fitness bands to smartwatches with an app for Samsung's upcoming Gear S.

The Nike+ Running app will come pre-loaded on the Gear S, and will put the watch's built-in GPS and cellular connections to good use. While out on a run, users can record their route and check their speed even if they've left their phones at home. The app also has a built-in music player and Facebook connectivity for "real-time cheers" from friends.

Samsung's Gear S is hardly the only wearable with GPS built-in, but that feature is notably absent from other smartwatches, and from some popular fitness bands such as Jawbone Up and Fitbit Flex. Without GPS, fitness bands essentially become step counters, unable to determine speed, pacing or route on their own.

And so far, the Gear S is the only major brand smartwatch with cellular connectivity. The ability to stay connected is useful for fitness applications, where your phone may not be on hand. (It's unclear, however, whether wireless carriers will support standalone smartwatches without charging a fortune for service.)

For Nike, the partnership is part of a bigger focus on software and services, and comes after reports in April claimed that the company would abandon its own fitness band business. Although Nike downplayed the rumors that it's getting out of hardware entirely—and it continues to sell its current line of FuelBand activity trackers—it hasn't denied the change in focus. The Gear S app is the first instance of Nike tapping into third-party wearables, though it may not be the last, with Apple expected to announce its own wearable device in a couple weeks.

Samsung's Gear S, meanwhile, will start a phased rollout in October, though the company hasn't announced specific release dates or pricing.

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IBM Watson cooks up some new dishes

When not busy helping to find new treatments for cancer, IBM Watson is helping to cook up a few new dishes as well.

To show off Watson's powers, IBM is training its cognitive computing system to suggest new combinations of ingredients that could help cooks to create new, and sometimes quite delicious, recipes. It does so by analyzing the chemical compounds in each ingredient.

IBM joined Bon Appétit magazine to create a Web application called Chef Watson, now in beta, that offers lists of ingredients that can be used to create recipes. Bon Appétit is also working up a cookbook of the best Watson-based creations submitted by users.

IBM focused Watson on the culinary world to "help the public understand what these new types of technologies are capable of doing," said Mike Rhodin, IBM senior vice president in the Watson Group, at an event Thursday to promote a new cloud service, called Watson Discovery Advisor. That service can help researchers in any field find fresh connections within vast realms of data.

"Much the same way Jeopardy helped people understand that cognitive systems could understand questions using natural language, Chef Watson helps us understand how these new systems can be used in our everyday lives," Rhodin said.

Tuning Watson to the culinary arts has proved to be a success story for IBM.

Watson "starts building an understanding of what ingredients and compounds work well together, and it then extrapolates and looks for new patterns," Steve Gold, IBM vice president for the Watson platform, said in an interview. "Turns out, Watson is really good at coming up with combinations of ingredients that have never been tried before."

In February, IBM set up a food truck at the SXSW interactive arts conference to show off some Watson-inspired recipes. It drew long lines of hungry attendees.

IBM Research first developed Watson to compete with human contestants on the Jeopardy game show in 2011, using natural language processing and analytics, as well as many sources of structured and unstructured data, to answer the shows questions.

In the years since, the company has been working to commercialize the Watson technology, identifying industries that could benefit from cognitive computing, such as health care, law enforcement and finance.

To help its researchers better understand the culinary arts, IBM paired with the Institute of Culinary Education in New York.

"Working with the system has augmented our creativity as chefs. It changes the whole way we approach our craft in the kitchen," said James Briscione, director of culinary development at the Institute of Culinary Education, speaking at Thursday's event.

Tasteful combinations of ingredients are at the core of good cooking. Some combinations have long been known: A nice piece of fish can be accentuated with some lemon, butter and herbs.

In the culinary arts, chefs often deploy "known combinations" of ingredients and foods, Briscione said. But they're are always looking for new combinations, too, scanning cookbooks and magazines and travelling to exotic locations to taste local foods.

"The challenge in our world is to move to the next step," Briscione said. "We want to push forward and try to find new ways of putting things together."

In the past few years, a trend has been to combine ingredients with complementary aromatic properties, the chemical compounds that produce the flavors people experience.

For example, caviar and white chocolate go really well together, even though one is salty and the other is sweet, because those two ingredients share a lot of aromatic compounds. Tomatoes, mozzarella, and Parmesan cheese share common compounds, making pizza a naturally delicious dish.

Watson puts this new wave of experimentation in overdrive, offering cooks lists of ingredients that may go well together by way of their aromatic properties. The chef can then look for ways to combine the ingredients in novel ways.

Because Watson is a learning machine, it's producing better recipes now than it was at the start of the project 18 months ago, Rhodin said.

"It was a little challenging to work with at first, and now it is making really innovative, incredible and exciting food," Briscione agreed.

For example, working with Watson, the Institute of Culinary Education came up with a Portuguese-inspired lobster roll with saffron, green olives, basil, and shreds of crispy pork. "I never would have set out to put [these ingredients] in a lobster roll," Briscione said. Yet the combination proved to be quite tasty.

Mixed drinks are also game for Watson. For SXSW, the chefs came up with a bourbon cocktail with vanilla, bananas and turmeric. Again, these are not ingredients that have historically been combined, but the Watson matching proved to be "an amazing combination," Briscione said.

Watson-inspired dishes can span different cultures and regions. Another dish the culinary school created was the Vietnamese Apple Kabob, consisting of pineapple, pork, chicken, mushrooms, and strawberries, which all share similar flavor compounds.

"We try to put together combinations of regions and ingredients that make no sense, and we try to make sense out of them," Briscione said.

In much the same way it is helping in cancer research, Watson is proving to be quite the time-saver, suggesting approaches that would take humans too much work to arrive at otherwise.

"Coming upon this information on your own, you'd be locked away for months at a time, digging through chemical analyses and trying to line up all the ingredients, and you still may never get there," Briscione said.

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Google's Project Wing building drone delivery service

For two years, Google has quietly been developing autonomous flying vehicles that can be used to deliver packages for disaster relief or for commerce purposes, the company revealed Thursday.

The program, dubbed Project Wing, has been housed under Google X, the company's secretive facility where it created other projects like Google Glass and its self-driving cars.

"Self-flying vehicles could open up entirely new approaches to moving goods—including options that are cheaper, faster, less wasteful and more environmentally sensitive than what's possible today," the company says in a document describing the effort.

The drones are designed to follow a pre-programmed route at the push of a button, flying at 40 to 60 meters above the ground.

One goal is to have the unmanned flying robots deliver small items like medicines and batteries that can be used for disaster relief or to bring aid to isolated areas. The initial idea was to deliver defibrillators to heart attack victims.

In a test, a Google drone lowers a package to the ground in Queensland, Australia.

"Even just a few of these, being able to shuttle nearly continuously, could service a very large number of people in an emergency situation," Astro Teller, Google's "captain of moonshots," as it calls its big projects, told the BBC.

Prototypes have already been built and tested delivering packages to remote farms in Queensland, Australia. The country was chosen because of its more open rules about drone use, the BBC said. Farmers there received candy bars, dog treats, cattle vaccines, water, and radios.

Eventually, Google might use the drones to deliver retail items to consumers at home, said a Google spokesman. Google has been working to expand its Google Shopping Express service, which right now uses cars for deliveries.

Amazon kicked off the delivery-by-drone craze in December when it said it was testing them for its packages, though some didn't take the idea seriously at the time.

Having unmanned vehicles buzzing around towns delivering packages seems like a radical and potentially dangerous endeavor, but Google's involvement further validates the idea. The company stressed that it's early days for Project Wing and it might be years before it comes out of testing.

For the next year, Google will focus on the safety system for the drones, to teach them to navigate around each other and handle events like mechanical trouble.

Also, "we have to fly efficient delivery routes that respect constraints such as noise, privacy, and safety of those on the ground, and we have to be good enough to deliver to an exact spot the size of a doorstop," Google said.

Project Wing was reported earlier Thursday by the BBC and The Atlantic.

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Baidu, Tencent help Chinese shopping malls take on Alibaba

Baidu and Tencent are teaming up with a Chinese shopping mall operator in a joint venture that could steal business away from local e-commerce giant Alibaba Group.

The two Internet companies are partnering with Dalian Wanda Group, a Chinese conglomerate, to spend 5 billion yuan (US$811 million) on a new e-commerce company, they announced on Friday.

Wanda will control a 70 percent stake in the joint venture, while Baidu and Tencent will each hold a 15 percent stake.

Baidu, China's largest search engine, and Tencent, a social networking and gaming company, have both made forays into China's online retail space in the past. But neither have managed to crack Alibaba's hold over the country's growing e-commerce market.

Friday's announcement, however, means the two companies will tap Wanda's resources to flesh out a new e-commerce platform that could challenge Alibaba. Wanda, operates dozens of department stores, movie theaters and hotels, but wants to bring more Chinese customers to its shops through online channels.

For consumers, the partnerships could lead to easier ways to shop from Wanda properties. In the future, customers can snap a photo of a dress or a movie poster with their smartphone to find out where to buy the product, or what time the film will show, said Baidu's CEO Robin Li during Friday's announcement.

"If you have a demand, we can not only tell you where you can satisfy your need, but we can do it immediately," Li said.

Tencent's CEO Ma Huateng said people shouldn't confuse the joint venture as another attempt to break into China's online retail sector. "This is more about how do you use the Internet to make an already established economic entity smarter," he said, while speaking at the event.

Friday's announcement comes as both Wanda and Alibaba have been competing in China's retail sector. Alibaba, which operates e-commerce sites Taobao and Tmall, has taken sales away from many large brick-and-mortar stores in China, said Mark Natkin, managing director of Beijing-based Marbridge Consulting.

In response, Chinese retailers are expanding with their own e-commerce sites, but still wanting customers to shop at their physical stores, he added.

"Somebody asked me, 'Who actually goes to these stores anymore?'" Natkin said. "To some degree, the success of these businesses hinges on their ability to incentivize customers to come in."

Both Baidu and Tencent have plenty of online products to help users connect with Wanda's stores. In Baidu's case, the company has its search engine, a major online mapping service, and a popular app downloading platform. Tencent, on the other hand, has its messaging services, including WeChat, a mobile app that has over 438 million monthly active users.

In an email, Tencent said the joint venture will help popularize its online payment services on WeChat, making it a destination to complete purchases from Wanda stores.

"Tencent is behind in the mobile payment space," Natkin said. "They are looking at anything they can do to wrest away market share from Alipay (Alibaba's own payment service)."

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LG playing waiting game for plasma TV exit

LG is waiting for the right time to exit the plasma TV business, a move that would leave almost no major companies making the flat-screens.

The company is in a "wait and see mode" about possibly ending production of plasma TVs, according to a spokesman.

"Weve known for a long time that demand for plasma units was declining," the LG spokesman wrote in an email. "When demand falls to a point where its no longer a viable business is where were trying to determine."

LG announced earlier this week the world's first 4K OLED TV.

South Korean news reports about the announcement of the 65-inch OLED TV with 3840 x 2160-pixel display said an LG official indicated the company would make an official statement on suspending plasma display panel TVs in the near future.

LG would be the latest manufacturer to quit plasma. To the disappointment of videophiles, Panasonic announced in 2013 it would end plasma panel research, ending production this year. The company was the largest maker in the field at one time.

Meanwhile, despite suggestions at CES 2014 that it was committed to plasma, Samsung said last month it will end production of plasma TVs in November.

LCD TV sets have come to dominate TV sales. They account for over 90 percent of global TV shipments, while shipments of plasma and CRT TVs are forecast to fall by 48 and 50 percent, respectively in 2014, according to data from NPD DisplaySearch.

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Retailers urged to defend against 'Backoff' point-of-sale malware

A payment card industry security consortium warned retailers on Wednesday of the urgency to secure their systems against "Backoff," a malicious software program that steals card numbers.

Backoff "represents a very real threat to the security of cardholder data in all organizations," wrote the PCI Security Standards Council, an organization founded by MasterCard, Visa, American Express and other card companies.

The U.S. Secret Service and Department of Homeland Security warned last week that 1,000 U.S. businesses may be infected by Backoff, which wasn't detected by most antivirus security software until earlier this month.

The retail industry has been shaken by attackers who have successfully installed malware on point-of-sale devices that process card payments, including Target, Neiman Marcus, White Lodging, Michaels and UPS store.

Card breaches have been reported by Supervalu and P.F. Chang's China Bistro, while several other companies have ongoing investigations into suspected breaches.

Card companies require companies to be compliant with the extensive security requirements issued by PCI-DSS or face liability for fraudulent purchases. But despite passing PCI audits, many companies have been hacked nonetheless, with attackers still finding network weaknesses.

The PCI Council recommended that companies check with their antivirus vendor to make sure their product detects Backoff and run a scan immediately. The organization also advised to "review all system logs for any strange or unexplained activity, especially large data files being sent to unknown locations."

Retailers should also refresh their passwords and change default ones, a long recommended security practice but one which still catches companies off guard.

Other recommendations made by the PCI Council may not be so easy or cheap. It recommended that merchants use card processing devices that encrypt data immediately after it is captured.

Several types of malware found on point-of-sale devices are so-called memory "scrapers," which capture the card data while it is held unencrypted in memory. The weakness is prevalent in retail POS devices on networks that pass PCI-DSS audits.

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FBI, Secret Service studying 'scope' of reported bank cyberattacks

A U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation spokesman said Wednesday the agency is working with the Secret Service to determine the "scope" of reported cyberattacks against several financial institutions.

Bloomberg reported on Wednesday that Russian hackers struck JPMorgan Chase and another bank earlier this month. A subsequent report in the New York Times said the attacks hit JPMorgan Chase and four other U.S. financial institutions.

The Times reported that "gigabytes" of information were stolen, including customer account information.

A JPMorgan Chase spokeswoman did not confirm the attacks, saying that "companies of our size unfortunately experience cyberattacks nearly every day. We have multiple layers of defense to counteract any threats and constantly monitor fraud levels."

Representatives for Wells Fargo, Bank of America and Citigroup—also frequent targets for hackers—could not be immediately reached for comment.

FBI spokesman Paul Bresson said via email that combating cyber threats is a top priority for the government, and the agency constantly works with U.S. companies to fight attacks.

Media reports speculated the attacks could be in retaliation due to sanctions against Russia for its actions in Ukraine, but the motives remain unclear.

Quoting an anonymous source, Bloomberg wrote that one of the attacks was executed via a zero-day vulnerability in one of the bank's websites. A zero-day flaw is one that attackers are exploiting but for which there is no fix.

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Samsung Gear S watch sports 3G, LG G Watch R gets curvy

Samsung and LG have announced more smartwatches ahead of next week's IFA trade show in Berlin, with an emphasis on connectivity and curvy faces.

Samsung Electronics announced the Gear S, its first smartwatch with 3G connectivity. Users can make or receive calls using the timepiece or get them forwarded from a smartphone, according to Samsung. That makes the Gear S one of the few smartwatches on the market that can act as a stand-alone device.

"The Samsung Gear S offers a new wearable experience with 3G connectivity and elegant curved display, expanding the smartphone experience to the wrist," a Samsung spokesman wrote in an email.

Powered by the Tizen operating system, it has a 2-inch, curved Super AMOLED display with a 360 by 480 resolution.

The Gear S has 512 MB of RAM, 4 GB of internal memory and a 300 mAh lithium-ion battery that lasts two days with typical use, the company said. Its sensors include a heart-rate monitor and UV monitors. It has also Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity.

The watch will be available in phases starting from October, Samsung said, with pricing announced then.

The LG G Watch R, meanwhile, has a circular face, much like a traditional wristwatch and in contrast to most smartwatches released to date.

It seems designed to take on another round smartwatch, the Android Wear Moto 360 from Motorola. I

The G Watch R has a plastic OLED display that's the first of its kind to use the entire watch face, LG Electronics said.

Set in a stainless steel frame, the 1.3-inch display has a 320 by 320 resolution that can boost display clarity when viewed at different angles and under bright sunlight.

The company's earlier G Watch was criticized for its bland design and large, bulky display of 1.5 inches by 1.8 inches, and it had an LCD screen with 280 by 280 resolution.

The G Watch R, which has health and fitness tracking functions and an embedded heartbeat sensor, resembles its predecessor in terms of specs. It runs on Android Wear and is powered by a 1.2 GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 400 processor, with 4 GB of storage, 512 MB of memory and a 410 mAh battery.

The dust- and water-resistant unit connects to Android smartphones via Bluetooth.

LG said it will roll out the device in the fourth quarter of 2014, but it did not give a specific date, region or price.

Both the Gear S and the G Watch R will be on display at IFA, which runs Sep 5 to 10.

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EMC gives VMware admins the reins to replication and recovery

EMC is putting replication and recovery into the hands of VMware administrators with a software version of its RecoverPoint appliance that's designed for cloud computing.

The new tool, RecoverPoint for Virtual Machines, works within the VMware vCenter management platform and can use storage from any vendor, EMC announced Tuesday at VMworld in San Francisco. The system can span direct-attached storage, network-attached storage and storage area networks. RecoverPoint for VMs is due to be available in October. Support for other hypervisors will come later, the company said.

As virtualization and cloud computing gradually dominate IT architectures, EMC is seeking to put the point of storage control closer to the application. RecoverPoint for VMs lets virtualization administrators create replica VMs without help from specialists overseeing the backup infrastructure or the network that connects it, said Elizabeth Phalen, vice president of EMC's Data Mobility business, in an online video presentation.

That's part of a broader trend made possible by virtualization and cloud technologies, said Dave Simpson, a storage analyst at 451 Group. Traditional disaster-recovery systems required a separate, identical data center, but now storage is growing simpler and more flexible. Meanwhile, the management of storage has moved closer to the applications themselves, and that's how it should be, he said.

"The application rules, more than storage rules," Simpson said. "Disaster recovery has been too complicated."

Startups, including Switzerland's Veeam, have helped push EMC along by giving virtualization administrators a bigger role in data protection, Simpson said.

VMware administrators can use RecoverPoint for VMs to set up replication and automatic disaster recovery for anything from a single VM to an entire site, according to EMC. It can also make ongoing data protection easier to manage by automatically configuring and changing the backup and recovery settings for VMs as they are created, modified, and moved, EMC says.

The automated workflows it can carry out include recovery of corrupted data to a certain point in time and non-disruptive disaster-recovery testing. Compression, deduplication and network optimization to reduce bandwidth needs for long-distance replication and recovery are included.

RecoverPoint for VMs will also form the basis of a new version of EMC's VSPEX all-in-one private cloud architecture, coming in the fourth quarter. It was one of three new VSPEX releases announced on Tuesday.

VSPEX, introduced in 2012, is a set of architectures combining storage from EMC with computing and networking components from select other vendors. It's similar to the VBlock systems from EMC's VCE partnership with Cisco and VMware but can be configured with gear from a wider range of vendors. EMC channel partners can build special VSPEX systems for vertical markets.

On Tuesday, EMC announced versions of VSPEX built around its XtremIO all-flash storage array and its ScaleIO software-defined storage system. The XtremIO version includes VMware's vSphere and new Horizon View 6 virtual desktop software, and it's designed to provide access to virtual desktops from anywhere for as many as 2,500 users.

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Server sales have turned a corner, IDC says

Server sales have picked up after a long slow spell and are likely to stay buoyant well into 2015 and beyond, IDC said Tuesday.

The growth last quarter was modest—worldwide server revenue climbed just 2.5 percent from a year earlier—but server makers will welcome the news after five consecutive quarters of declines.

Server makers are benefitting from the start of a cyclical refresh cycle, as customers replace systems they deployed soon after the financial crisis, IDC said.

But there are other factors at work too, said IDC analyst Kuba Stolarski. Sales of x86 servers have been strong for some time, lifted by companies like Google and Facebook building out their massive infrastructures.

But at the higher end of the market, sales of pricey Unix and mainframe systems have been in decline for years, dragging down the server market as a whole. Now, those systems comprise a small enough share of the market that the x86 gains can shine though, Stolarski said.

What's more, sales of a new type of midrange system—the converged infrastructure products sold by companies like Cisco Systems and VCE—have been increasing, also contributing to overall growth.

The upshot of those trends is that the server market eked out some growth in the April-June quarter. Worldwide factory revenue reached $12.6 billion, up from $12.3 billion last quarter.

Two upcoming developments mean the growth should continue and then accelerate next year, IDC said.

One is the release of servers based on Intel's Grantley Xeon server platform, expected at its developer conference in San Francisco next month. A new Intel chip usually prompts a wave of server purchases.

Further out, Microsoft will end support next year for its widely used Windows Server 2003 OS, which will prompt more upgrades.

Anyone expecting a "Windows XP" moment for servers should beware, though. The transition will likely be slower, Stolarski said, and some customers will keep their existing hardware and upgrade the OS.

Hewlett-Packard kept its top position in the server market last quarter with 25.4 percent of revenue, up slightly from the year before.

Cisco was the biggest winner, expanding its revenue 35.4 percent. It still has a small share overall, at 4.4 percent, but IDC said it took joint fourth place with Oracle, whose sales increased slightly.

Among the losers last quarter were IBM, which is in the process of selling its x86 server business to Lenovo, and saw its sales drop 10 percent, and Dell, which is now a private company and saw sales decline 6.5 percent, according to IDC.

(IDC is owned by International Data Group, the parent company of IDG News Service.)

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Netflix open sources internal threat monitoring tools

Netflix has released three internal tools it uses to catch hints on the Web that hackers might target its services.

"Many security teams need to stay on the lookout for Internet-based discussions, posts and other bits that may be of impact to the organizations they are protecting," wrote Andy Hoernecke and Scott Behrens of Netflix's Cloud Security Team.

One of the tools, called Scumblr, can be used to create custom searches of Google sites, Twitter and Facebook for users or keywords. The searches can be set to run regularly or be done manually, they wrote.

Scumblr has a component called Workflowable that can be used to organize and prioritize the results. Workflowable has a plugin architecture that can be used to set custom triggers for automated actions, they wrote.

When something of interest is found on a website, another tool called Sketchy takes a screenshot.

"One of the features we wanted to see in Scumblr was the ability to collect screenshots and text content from potentially malicious sites," they wrote. "This allows security analysts to preview Scumblr results without the risk of visiting the site directly."

Scumblr, Sketchy and Workflowable have been released under open-source software licenses on GitHub.

To be sure, many sophisticated attackers keep their discussions of attacks on password-protected forums whose visitors are closely vetted by the site's operators. But there are also many so-called "hacktivists" who are less discrete.

Often eager for publicity, those attackers will use social networking sites such as Twitter to brag or warn of their campaigns, which could be picked up quickly by Scumblr.

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Netcore, Netis routers have hardcoded password, Trend Micro says

A line of routers from a China-based manufacturer has a serious flaw that could allow a hacker to monitor someone's Internet traffic, according to research from Trend Micro.

The routers are sold under the Netcore brand name in China and Netis outside of the country, wrote Tim Yeh a threat researcher.

Trend found a "backdoor," or a semi-secret way to access the device, Yeh wrote. The password needed to open up the backdoor is hardcoded into the device's firmware. All of the routers appear to have the same password.

"Attackers can easily log into these routers, and users cannot modify or disable this backdoor," he wrote.

Backdoors can be used for legitimate product support, but coding such access methods into software is generally discouraged for fear of abuse.

The Netcore and Netis routers have an open UDP port, 53413, which can be queried since the routers have an externally accessible IP address, Yeh wrote. Trend Micro scanned the Internet and found more than 2 million IP addresses with the open UDP port, which could indicate vulnerable equipment.

"Almost all of these routers are in China, with much smaller numbers in other countries, including but not limited to South Korea, Taiwan, Israel, and the United States," Yeh wrote.

Trend Micro has notified the company but did not receive a response. Company officials reached in Shenzhen didn't have an immediate comment.

By using the backdoor, an attacker could upload or download files to the device. A router's settings could also be changed to allow a hacker to monitor a person's Internet traffic as part of a man-in-the-middle attack, Yeh wrote.

Trend also found that a file containing a username and password for the routers' Web-based administration control panel is stored unencrypted, which could be downloaded by an attacker.

It doesn't appear that most Netcore and Netis routers support the installation of other open-source firmware packages, such as dd-wrt or Tomato, that could be used to replace the vulnerable software, Yeh wrote.

"Aside from that, the only adequate alternative would be to replace these devices," he wrote.

(Michael Kan in Beijing contributed to this report.)

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Microsoft considering development boards for Windows Phone, RT

Microsoft has considered making development boards for Windows Phone or Windows RT in addition to the x86 boards it already makes, but the company isn't saying if it would ever release such products.

Microsoft hasn't yet announced plans to release such boards, which would be platforms for writing applications for Windows Phone and Windows RT, but there has been some talk about the idea, Microsoft representatives said during a webcast on Monday.

"We don't have any plans we can announce ... right now, but rest assured, it's something that keeps us awake at night," Peter Wieland, principal developer at Microsoft, said during the webcast.

"Stay tuned, we'll let you know as soon as we've got plans firmed up," said Viraf Gandhi, senior program manager at Microsoft, following Wieland's comments.

In the past two months, Microsoft has released Windows-based development boards, based on Intel x86 processors, that hardware hackers can use to test and develop products. Those products could be smart appliances, robots, sensors or even tablets.

The boards are a way for Microsoft to tap into the maker community for new ideas about devices where Windows might be used. One such area is the "Internet of things," where data-collecting instruments gather and transmit real-time information for alerts or analysis. Through developer boards, Microsoft hopes to put Windows in more IoT devices, which are expected to number in the billions in the coming years.

Windows Phone and RT run on ARM processors, so Microsoft's x86 development boards don't apply to those OSes. The company offers two boards today: Galileo, which runs on a low-power Intel Quark processor, is for smart devices, robots and Internet-connected appliances; and Sharks Cove, which has an Intel Bay Trail processor, is mainly for tablets and PC driver development.

ARM dominates the smartphone and tablet market and increasingly is being used in development boards from other vendors. For example, the popular US$25 Raspberry Pi board has an ARM processor and runs on Linux.

Thousands of Galileo boards with a pared-down version of Windows 8.1 have been shipped to developers, presenters said during the webcast.

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China says Microsoft hasn't been fully transparent in anti-monopoly probe

Chinese authorities are claiming that Microsoft has yet to fully comply with the government's anti-monopoly investigation, and is demanding more information about its media player and Web browser distribution.

"Information relating to Microsoft's suspected Windows and Office software has not been fully open," said Zhang Mao, the head of China's State Administration for Industry and Commerce (SAIC), at a Tuesday press conference.

The antitrust regulator has been investigating Microsoft on an industry complaint related to compatibility and bundling issues with the company's Windows and Office software. Although the regulator has to yet elaborate on the specific problems, SAIC started raiding Microsoft offices in China last month, as part of its probe.

Despite SAIC's claim that Microsoft is still withholding information, Zhang added that the U.S. company has expressed it will respect Chinese laws and cooperate with authorities in their investigation. He offered no further information.

Microsoft did not immediately comment. But the company has said in the past it is willing to answer the government's questions.

Like in other parts of the world, Windows is still the top PC operating system in China, with a 90 percent share, according to StatCounter. About 40 percent of those users are still on Windows XP, an operating system that Microsoft officially retired earlier this year, ending its support for security updates.

Recently, the Chinese government has been showing signs it wants to curb Microsoft's influence. In May, the country banned government purchases of Windows 8 devices, with a state-controlled publication stating it was because of security concerns.

SAIC's investigation comes as China has been opening other anti-monopoly probes against foreign companies, including car makers and U.S. chip vendor Qualcomm. In Qualcomm's case, the company has allegedly been overcharging clients when licensing its patents.

Earlier this month, SAIC also warned in an online notice that Microsoft would need to follow China's law, and not block its investigation.

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Sony says 'high traffic' downs PlayStation, Entertainment networks

Sony said Sunday that 'high traffic' downed its PlayStation and Entertainment networks, with the group claiming responsibility also apparently involved in a security threat concerning a flight carrying a Sony executive.

The group, which calls itself the "Lizard Squad," wrote on Twitter that "today we planted the ISIS flag on @Sony's servers," referring to the militant group that occupies parts of Iraq and Syria.

Sony Online Entertainment President John Smedley wrote on Twitter that Sony was hit with a large-scale distributed denial-of-service attack. The attack struck upstream traffic routes over which Sony has no control, which affected players' ability to log in, he wrote.

DDoS attacks involve sending overwhelming amounts of data to a service provider in an attempt to crash the network.

Sony issued a statement Sunday, writing that while the high traffic impacted its network, "no personal information has been accessed." No more technical detail was provided.

"We will continue to work towards fixing this issue and hope to have our services up and running as soon as possible," wrote Sony spokesman Sid Shuman. "We regret any inconvenience this may have caused."

Earlier in the day, the Lizard Squad tweeted directly to American Airlines, writing that it had "received reports" that a flight carrying Smedley "has explosives on board." Smedley had earlier tweeted that his flight had been diverted, writing that the matter concerned "something about security and our cargo."

It appears from the timeline of tweets that the Lizard Squad—eager to aggravate Sony—upped the stakes after seeing Smedley complain of a delay.

American Airlines Flight 362, which left from Dallas-Fort Worth for San Diego, was diverted to Phoenix due to "a security-related issue," wrote Michelle Mohr, director of corporate communications, in a statement. The Boeing 757, with 179 passengers and six crew, landed safely, she said.

The Lizard Squad had also tweeted directly to Smedley with a YouTube video showing one of the burning World Trade Center towers hit by a plane in the terrorist attacks of 2001.

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Airbnb to reveal 124 New York hosts to attorney general

Airbnb will hand over information on 124 of its hosts in New York to comply with a request from the state attorney general, who is investigating the legality of the service, the company said Friday.

The attorney general sought unredacted personal information on the New York City hosts last week, Airbnb said in a blog post. The company notified affected hosts of the request, with which it intends to comply.

The order from New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman comes as part of a larger investigation into whether people are using Airbnb's service in violation of state and local laws. Under one law, New Yorkers cannot rent out an apartment for fewer than 30 days without the occupant being present. Authorities are also looking at use of the site as an "illegal hotel service," in which hosts may create multiple listings at once without paying hotel taxes.

Airbnb said in May it would be submitting information on about 16,000 New York City hosts, albeit in an anonymized form that omitted details such as names, addresses and Social Security numbers. The attorney general planned to use that information to see which people were creating multiple listings without violating their privacy.

Schneiderman now wants more information on some of those hosts. Airbnb said it was hard to know why those 124 hosts were targeted specifically. However, the attorney general is probably not after anyone except "individuals who may be flagrantly misusing our platform," Airbnb said.

The vast majority of the 124 hosts no longer use Airbnb's site, the company said. An Airbnb spokesman declined to comment further.

A spokeswoman for the attorney general's office declined to say why the 124 hosts were singled out or clarify what information on them it was seeking.

Airbnb has already taken steps to remove what it calls "bad actors" who may be violating laws in New York. The company said in April it had removed more than 2,000 such listings.

The attorney general's office has one year to review all its data.

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Two Galileo GPS satellites launched in wrong orbit

Two satellites that are intended to form part of the European Galileo satellite navigation system went astray from their intended orbit after launch from French Guiana on Friday, satellite launch company Arianespace said.

Galileo is being built by Europe as a civil alternative to the U.S. GPS (global positioning system) and the Russian GLONASS. The system is designed to be interoperable with GPS and GLONASS. Europe is targeting the technology at a number of applications including location-based services on mobile phones, aviation, and civil protection and surveillance.

Arianespace said Saturday the European Space Agency and the European Commission will set up an investigation panel on Monday to identify the cause of the defective orbit and what needs to be done to resume the Soyuz launches from the Guiana Space Center (CSG).

The launch firm, backed by European space companies and related agencies, did not say whether the orbit could be fixed, but said studies and data analysis continue to "determine the scope of the anomaly and its impact on the mission." The European Space Agency said further information on the status of the satellites will be made available after the preliminary analysis of the situation.

The lift-off and first part of the mission proceeded without issues, and the satellites were released according to a planned timetable, and signals were received from the satellites. "It was only a certain time after the separation of the satellites that the ongoing analysis of the data provided by the telemetry stations operated by the European Space Agency (ESA) and the French space agency CNES showed that the satellites were not in the expected orbit," Arianespace said. The orbit of the satellites is now elliptical rather than the intended circular orbit.

On Friday, the European Commission described the launch of two new Galileo satellites from Kourou, in French Guiana, as "another milestone in the history of the programme." Four satellites are already in orbit and the system's operation has been validated. With two additional satellites in orbit, Galileo is moving closer to the provision of early services in the course of next year, the Commission said.

A second launch is planned this year with more satellites to go into orbit in 2015. It is unclear whether the anomaly discovered in the two satellites over the weekend will affect the proposed launches.

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Report: Amazon building ad system to compete with Google's

Amazon plans to expand its small online ad delivery business enough to take on Google's AdWords, according to a Wall Street Journal report.

The company is developing a platform for delivering ads both on its own properties and other sites, potentially creating a significant new source of revenue for the e-commerce giant, the report on Friday said. The move could also reduce the number of Google-delivered ads on Amazon's own site.

Amazon has told potential advertising partners that it could begin testing the platform, currently dubbed Amazon Sponsored Links, later this year, the report said.

Given its scale and access to shopping information, Amazon might be able to challenge the dominance of Google's AdWords, which fuels that company's US$50 billion-a-year advertising business.

Many of the ads on Amazon's pages now are supplied by Google, though Amazon does place some product ads on its own site and has a small business supplying ads on other sites. With the new system, Amazon would expand its own program to handle more types of ads, said the report.

The system would resemble Google's AdWords, which places keyword-targeted ads alongside Google's search results and on millions of other websites, the Journal said. Its technology would let ad agencies buy ads in bulk, possibly for thousands of advertisers.

Beyond that, there weren't other details on how the reported system would work. Amazon did not immediately respond to comment on the report. A Google representative declined to comment.

Google is by far the dominant player in search, and Amazon would surely face challenges scaling its own system to compete. But the platform, should it eventually launch, could be a big success for Amazon, given all the information it has on people's online shopping habits.

And as Amazon expands its home delivery services, such as Amazon Fresh, the company could gain new valuable data for a more robust advertising program.

Amazon's new Fire smartphone could also provide new data, and real estate, for targeted ads.

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DeLorean tries to predict your next move, could reduce lag in online gaming

Ask any gamer about how they feel about lag in online gaming, and they'll probably want to throw something in lieu of an answer. It might not be possible to eliminate lag entirely, but Microsoft researchers are toying with a way to mitigate it by trying to guess your next move.

The experimental technology, called DeLorean, is what Microsoft calls a "speculative execution system,"and it uses a mix of predictive technologies along with time-shifting and bandwidth compression to "[produce] speculative rendered frames of future possible outcomes" ahead of time to reduce apparent lag resulting from network latency.

The idea here is basically to try to anticipate your next actions in a game and to reduce overhead in order to mask the lag.

The idea here is basically to try to anticipate your next actions in a game and to reduce overhead in order to mask the lag. According to Microsoft researchers, eliminating network latency lag is not practical, and that even with a fast wired residential Internet connection, you can experience over 100 milliseconds of lag—enough of a delay to frustrate just about any gamer. 

Even in this experimental stage, DeLorean can mitigate up to 250 milliseconds of lag caused by network latency when playing cloud-based games, according to researchers.

To test the system, Microsoft researchers created modified versions of the games Doom 3 and Fable 3, and found that "players overwhelmingly prefer DeLorean" over standard, lag-ridden cloud-based gaming, and that "DeLorean successfully mimics playing across a low-latency network."

DeLorean is still an experimental technology, so you likely won't see it integrated into commercially games any time soon. In the meantime, you can read the research paper if you are so inclined.

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AMD introduces the R9 285, its latest Radeon graphics card

During its 30 Years of Gaming and Graphics event on Saturday, AMD announced the Radeon R9 285, the newest addition to the company's lineup of desktop graphics cards.

As noted by Tom's Hardware, the R9 285 is based around AMD's Tonga Pro GPU: The board features a clock speed of 918MHz, and a memory speed of 5.5Gbps. Put it all together and you have a board that can deliver up to 3.29 teraFLOPS of computing performance.

The R9 285 is a 190-watt PCI Express 3.0 board, and requires a pair of six-pin power connectors. As Tom's Hardware points out, this compares favorably to the 250-watt power draw of the R9 285's predecessor, the R9 280.

AMD touts the R9 285 as being faster than the Nvidia GTX 760, and says that it "designed it for a single purpose: to play demanding PC games at maximum detail better than any card in its class." We'll have to wait and see if AMD's claims hold up in the real world, though.

The Radeon R9 will be available for purchase on September 2nd, and it'll set you back $249.

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US warns 'significant number' of major businesses hit by Backoff malware

Over a thousand major enterprise networks and small and medium businesses in the U.S. have been compromised by a recently discovered malware package called "Backoff" and are probably unaware of it, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said in a cybersecurity alert on Friday.

Backoff first appeared in October 2013 and is capable of scraping the memory contents of point of sales systems—industry speak for cash registers and other terminals used at store checkouts—for data swiped from credit cards, from monitoring the keyboard and logging keystrokes, from communicating with a remote server.

"Over the past year, the Secret Service has responded to network intrusions at numerous businesses throughout the United States that have been impacted by the "Backoff" malware," the alert said. "Seven PoS system providers/vendors have confirmed that they have had multiple clients affected."

The malware is thought to be responsible for the recent data breaches at Target, SuperValu supermarkets and UPS stores, and the Secret Service is still learning of new infections.

DHS first warned of Backoff in late July, when it noted the malware was not detectable my most antivirus software. That made it particularly difficult to stop, because much of the fight against computer viruses and malware rests on antivirus applications.

Most antivirus packages now detect Backoff, but DHS is advising network operators take immediate action to ensure they haven't been affected.

"DHS strongly recommends actively contacting your IT team, antivirus vendor, managed service provider, and/or point of sale system vendor to assess whether your assets may be vulnerable and/or compromised," it said. "The Secret Service is active in contacting impacted businesses, as they are identified, and continues to work with and support those businesses that have been impacted by this PoS malware."

In many cases, hackers gained access to machines through brute-force attacks on remote log-in systems offered through companies like Microsoft, Apple, Google and other third-party vendors. Once inside, they were able to copy the malware to the machine and set it capturing credit card data.

The DHS asked that instances of it are reported to a local Secret Service field office.

The Target data breach was one of the largest in recent memory, resulting in tens of millions of credit and debit cards being compromised. In the last couple of weeks, SuperValu said that at least 180 of its stores had been hit by a data breach and earlier this week UPS said 51 of it UPS Store locations had been hit.

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Airbnb to reveal 124 New York hosts to attorney general

Airbnb will hand over information on 124 of its hosts in New York to comply with a request from the state attorney general, who is investigating the legality of the service, the company said Friday.

The attorney general sought unredacted personal information on the New York City hosts this week, Airbnb said in a blog post. The company notified affected hosts of the request, with which it intends to comply.

The order from New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman comes as part of a larger investigation into whether people are using Airbnb's service in violation of state and local laws. Under one law, New Yorkers cannot rent out an apartment for fewer than 30 days without the occupant being present. Authorities are also looking at use of the site as an "illegal hotel service," in which hosts may create multiple listings at once without paying hotel taxes.

Airbnb said in May it would be submitting information on about 16,000 New York City hosts, albeit in an anonymized form that omitted details such as names, addresses and Social Security numbers. The attorney general planned to use that information to see which people were creating multiple listings without violating their privacy.

Schneiderman now wants more information on some of those hosts. Airbnb said it was hard to know why those 124 hosts were targeted specifically. However, the attorney general is probably not after anyone except "individuals who may be flagrantly misusing our platform," Airbnb said.

The vast majority of the 124 hosts no longer use Airbnb's site, the company said. An Airbnb spokesman declined to comment further.

A spokeswoman for the attorney general's office declined to say why the 124 hosts were singled out or clarify what information on them it was seeking.

Airbnb has already taken steps to remove what it calls "bad actors" who may be violating laws in New York. The company said in April it had removed more than 2,000 such listings.

The attorney general's office has one year to review all its data.

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Report: Amazon building ad system to compete with Google's

Amazon plans to expand its small online ad delivery business enough to take on Google's AdWords, according to a Wall Street Journal report.

The company is developing a platform for delivering ads both on its own properties and other sites, potentially creating a significant new source of revenue for the e-commerce giant, the report on Friday said. The move could also reduce the number of Google-delivered ads on Amazon's own site.

Amazon has told potential advertising partners that it could begin testing the platform, currently dubbed Amazon Sponsored Links, later this year, the report said.

Given its scale and access to shopping information, Amazon might be able to challenge the dominance of Google's AdWords, which fuels that company's US$50 billion-a-year advertising business.

Many of the ads on Amazon's pages now are supplied by Google, though Amazon does place some product ads on its own site and has a small business supplying ads on other sites. With the new system, Amazon would expand its own program to handle more types of ads, said the report.

The system would resemble Google's AdWords, which places keyword-targeted ads alongside Google's search results and on millions of other websites, the Journal said. Its technology would let ad agencies buy ads in bulk, possibly for thousands of advertisers.

Beyond that, there weren't other details on how the reported system would work. Amazon did not immediately respond to comment on the report. A Google representative declined to comment.

Google is by far the dominant player in search, and Amazon would surely face challenges scaling its own system to compete. But the platform, should it eventually launch, could be a big success for Amazon, given all the information it has on people's online shopping habits.

And as Amazon expands its home delivery services, such as Amazon Fresh, the company could gain new valuable data for a more robust advertising program.

Amazon's new Fire smartphone could also provide new data, and real estate, for targeted ads.

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Intel highlights more of its wireless computing plans

Intel is taking more steps to provide what it calls "wire-free" computing by 2016, a plan the company first talked about publicly in June at the Computex trade show.

The company is developing a smart dock through which laptops can wirelessly connect to monitors and external peripherals, it said in a blog entry.

The dock will remove the need to plug HDMI or DisplayPort display connectors directly into laptops. The wireless dock will provide USB 3.0-like speeds to transfer data to external peripherals.

"When you walk in the office with your laptop, it will automatically link with your wireless-enabled monitor or projector to deliver an HD streaming experience without the hassle of plugging into your HDMI or DisplayPort," Intel said.

The chip maker is also developing technology so wireless monitors automatically start and link up when laptops are within a specific distance. Intel calls this "proximity-based peripheral syncing" technology.

Intel demonstrated the technology in a video accompanying the blog post. Users could also log on with face recognition, without the need to touch the keyboard.

Intel has said most of its wire-free computing will be based on WiGig, a fast-growing wireless data transfer technology. WiGig is considered faster than the latest Wi-Fi technology. Intel is also considering WiGig to connect wireless keyboards and mice to laptops.

The company also wants to get rid of power adapters and is developing wireless charging technologies for laptops. Intel at Computex showed laptops charging on a table equipped with a charging pad based on A4WP's Rezence magnetic resonance technology.

Intel will talk about wire-free computing for business PCs at the Intel Developer Forum next month in San Francisco. The company will share details about wireless docking and displays as part of vPro, Intel's platform for managing PCs remotely.

Intel wants to make laptops easier to use, so they are more like smartphones and tablets, said Dean McCarron, principal analyst at Mercury Research.

"If they don't make investment like this, an old-school laptop starts looking really old," McCarron said. "The goal of all this stuff is to make things seamless and transparent."

The wire-free development also underscores the importance of WiGig, with more companies investing in the technology, McCarron said.

Qualcomm last month purchased Wilocity, which develops WiGig technology, for an undisclosed amount. Qualcomm will put WiGig in its Snapdragon mobile chipsets so smartphones and tablets can wirelessly stream 4K video to external displays.

Wireless charging will be a big deal for laptops, but it's not clear which technology will win, McCarron said. The competing wireless charging technology to Rezence is Qi, which was developed by the Wireless Power Consortium.

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Google's search app gets friendlier to bilingual Android users

Want to Google the name of a restaurant in English and then ask for the weather in Japanese? On Android it no longer requires switching back and forth between language settings.

For voice searches, users can now select up to five languages in the search app from the more than 50 supported, Google said Thursday. The app already supported that many languages, but users had to change their settings every time they wanted to switch between them. Now it recognizes automatically the language being spoken.

The change lets people search information in different languages back-to-back. That means you can ask for the weather in Spanish and then dictate a text in French, Google explained.

For now, the update is only for voice search with the latest version of the search app on Android, a Google spokeswoman said.

Getting it to work requires a one-time change to the language settings in the apps menu. Some languages are available in quite a few dialects. For Spanish, there's different versions for El Salvador, Spain, Mexico and other countries. For Chinese, there are three versions of Mandarin and also Cantonese. A handful of forms for Arabic are supported.

Results are displayed in the language spoken, assuming the app detects it. In one test, spoken results were given for the local weather in Japanese, but not in Spanish.

Google said it will add more languages over time.

On the desktop, people can select their preferred language for all Google services via their Google+ page. But as it works now, only one language can be chosen.

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Mobile apps could be abused to make expensive phone calls

A security precaution skipped in mobile applications such as Facebook's Messenger could be abused to make an expensive phone call at a victim's expense, a developer contends.

Phone numbers often appear as links on a mobile device. That is possible by using a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) scheme called "tel" to trigger a call.

URI schemes are a large family of descriptions that can tell a computer where to go for a certain resource, such as launching a mail application when an email address is clicked.

Andrei Neculaesei, a full-stack developer with the wireless streaming company Airtame in Copenhagen, contends there's a risk in how most native mobile applications handle phone numbers.

If a person clicks on a phone number within Apple's mobile Safari browser, a pop-up asks if a person wants to proceed with a call.

But many native mobile applications, including Facebook's Messenger and Google's +, will go ahead and make the call without asking, Neculaesei wrote on his blog.

Mobile apps can be configured to display a warning, but on most applications it's turned off, Neculaesei said via email on Thursday.

He found a malicious way to abuse the behavior. He created a Web page containing JavaScript that caused a mobile application to trigger a call after someone merely viewed the page. The JavaScript automatically launches the phone number's URI when the page is opened.

A demonstration on his blog showed how a malicious link, sent through Facebook's Messenger, will launch a call when viewed. Neculaesei wrote that someone could create a link that when viewed immediately launches a call to a premium-rate number, which the attacker gets the revenue from.

His testing found that Facebook's Messenger app, Apple's Facetime, Google's Gmail and Google + applications do not warn users before launching a call.

Facebook and Google couldn't be immediately reached for comment. Neculaesei wrote that he only tested a few big-name apps, but it's probable that smaller teams and platforms haven't thought about the risk either.

Neculaesei's finding dovetails with research presented earlier this month at the Bsides security conference in Las Vegas.

Guillaume K. Ross, an information security consultant in Montreal, found that URI schemes can be abused, resulting in data losses or compromising a person's privacy. A video of his presentation is online.

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YouTube music might be a win for other Google services

A tricked-out version of YouTube offering exclusive content might prove lucrative bait for Google to lure some of its users deeper into its digital video and music services.

YouTube appears to be readying a paid premium music service that would cost US$9.99 a month, called YouTube Music Key. Roughly a dozen purported screenshots of the service were recently published online on the blog Android Police, possibly showing how it would work. The images showed exclusive content such as remixes or cover songs, offline access to entire albums or concerts, and personalized playlists.

A YouTube spokesman declined to comment, but rumors of a paid music service from the Google-owned video site have been circulating for some time now. An earlier report in the Financial Times claimed YouTube was blocking or penalizing independent labels that were not signing up for the yet-to-launch paid service. Earlier this month, YouTube head Susan Wojcicki confirmed the company was working on some kind of subscription music service, in a Re/code interview.

So it looks likely that a premium version of YouTube just for music is on the way. The free version of YouTube works well for many right now, but a premium version might let Google monetize some new content and lead users to the company's other digital media services.

The amount and diversity of content already available free on YouTube is massive, and the advertisements don't interrupt the listening experience like those on Spotify or Pandora do. Plus, Google already offers Google Play All Access, a paid music service that syncs across devices and lets people listen offline, for $9.99 a month.

"Premium" might be the draw for a paid music service. The special content might include exclusive recordings of professional artists' cover songs, or unreleased tracks similar to iTunes exclusives.

To do that, Google would probably have to strike new licensing deals with music labels. But if YouTube could convert just a tiny fraction of its billion-plus monthly users into paying customers, that might be a win for Google, argues Mark Mulligan, co-founder of the music and technology research firm Midia Consulting.

YouTube claims viewers watch more than 6 billion hours of video each month on its site—almost an hour for every person on Earth—and that 100 hours of video are uploaded every minute. That catalogue is peerless, Mulligan said, but Google probably wants to do more with it in order to take on streaming services like Spotify, Rdio or Beats Music.

"YouTube has the ability to offer so much more than anyone else, with video the killer component," he said.

Google might also package a premium YouTube music service with the pure audio content in Google's All Access app. The combination, if it's done cleanly, could help Google distinguish itself from some of its competitors.

"Users listening to music on Google Play, for instance, could get recommendations for premium video content," said Sam Rosen, an industry analyst at ABI Research who studies digital video services. Or, a user exploring music videos could add a song to his or her video playlist, then automatically have it added to his audio collection on another Google-owned service.

There's a good chance the premium content would also include live streaming concerts, something YouTube has already offered on its free site.

In sum, YouTube may not be looking to monetize what it already has, but something else. The wild card could be whether the company can reach the right deals with publishers and labels.

"Google's stance here fits into a broader phase in the evolution of digital content," Midia's Mulligan said in a blog post about earlier reports of YouTube's premium service. Technology giants like Google, Apple and Amazon, he said, are testing how far they can push their partners to strengthen their already strong products.

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'Reveton' ransomware upgraded with powerful password stealer

A type of malware called Reveton, which falsely warns users they've broken the law and demands payment of a fine, has been upgraded with powerful password stealing functions, according to Avast.

Reveton is in a class of nasty programs known as "ransomware," which includes the notorious Cryptolocker program that encrypts a computer's files. The FBI issued a warning about Reveton in August 2012 after its Internet Crime Complaint Center was flooded with complaints.

The malware often infects computers via drive-by download when a person visits a website rigged to automatically exploit software vulnerabilities. Users are helpless after the computer is locked, with Reveton demanding a few hundred dollars as ransom payable various web-money services.

Avast analyzed a version of Reveton that has a module containing the Pony password stealer, which can also steal virtual currency stored on a computer such as bitcoin.

Pony can pluck and decrypt encrypted passwords for FTP, VPN and email clients, web browsers and instant messaging programs.

The version of Reveton analyzed by Avast also has another password stealer from the Papras family of malware. It's not as effective as Pony but can disable security programs, the company wrote on its blog.

This particular sample of Reveton was pre-programmed to search a web browser's history and cookies to see if the user had visited online sites of 17 German banks, the company wrote.

Avast speculated the capabilities may have been added to Reveton due to falling profits from merely locking computers in an attempt to extract a ransom. Its authors have "decided to enter into a new black business area," it wrote.

Around February 2013, an ethnic Russian man was arrested in Dubai upon request of Spanish police for allegedly coordinating Reveton campaigns, netting €1 million (US$1.3 million).

Ten other people were also arrested on money laundering charges for allegedly laundering the proceeds and transferring funds to Russia, according to Trend Micro.

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China paving the way for big Xbox One sales

China has approved the sale of 5 million Xbox One units, opening the way for Microsoft to make a big splash in the country's emerging console sector.

Microsoft's Chinese partner BesTV revealed the figure in a Tuesday earnings statement. The Chinese version of the Xbox One goes on in China on Sept. 23, after the country ended a 13-year-old ban on the import of foreign game consoles.

Although China often censors gaming content to weed out excessive violence, the approval of 5 million Xbox One units signals that the country's government is still giving ample room for actual device sales.

BesTV, a provider of Internet television services, is confident the Xbox One will rake in big profits over time. The industry is projecting that China's console gaming market has the potential to sell over 50 million units over the next five years, the company said.

The Xbox One first launched in western markets last November, with total shipments reaching 5 million units in April.

Chinese gamers have been looking forward to launch of the local version. But last month Microsoft revealed that the Chinese version of the Xbox One will cost consumers 3,699 yuan (US$600), $200 more than the U.S. version.

Despite the price, some local gaming merchants and experts believe the Xbox One will still attract customers. Microsoft and BesTV are bringing aboard local vendors and developers to create games and sell the system across the country.

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Why would Chinese hackers want hospital patient data?

The theft of personal data on 4.5 million patients of Community Health Systems by hackers in China highlights the increasing degree to which hospitals are becoming lucrative targets for information theft.

Already this year, around 150 incidents of lost or stolen personal data—either due to hacking or ineptitude—have been reported by medical establishments to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

In the case of Community Health Systems, hackers stole patient names, addresses, birth dates, telephone numbers and Social Security numbers. They did not steal medical data, Community Health Systems said—but that data can be the real prize in such breaches.

With its high prices and lack of a centralized health system, the U.S. is a lucrative target because in the right marketplace, health records can be worth a lot of money, said John Halamka, chief information officer of the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and chairman of the New England Healthcare Exchange Network.

That's because people without health insurance can potentially get treatment by using medical data of one of the hacking victims.

Halamka, who also runs the "Life as a healthcare CIO" blog, said a medical record can be worth between US$50 and $250 to the right customer—many times more than the amount typically paid for a credit card number, or the cents paid for a user name and password.

"If I am one of the 50 million Americans who are uninsured ... and I need a million-dollar heart transplant, for $250 I can get a complete medical record including insurance company details," he said.

As long as personal details like age, weight and height are approximately correct—and with a faked second form of ID—a person could use the stolen data to convince a hospital they are insured and receive treatment, Halamka said.

The Affordable Care Act is reducing the numbers of uninsured but there remain many Americans who don't have sufficient insurance for various procedures.

The situation is different in a country like the U.K., where the National Health Service assigns a unique ID number that ties patients to centralized medical records.

In the U.S. with its patchwork of health networks and insurance systems, spotting an imposter is more difficult. And moving to a common patient ID system is difficult due to legislation signed into law by former President Bill Clinton that limits what private companies can do with medical records.

To guard against hackers, health care CIOs are investing in security like never before, said Halamka.

"There's nothing like a million-dollar fine to be a wake-up call to enhance security," he said, referring to the maximum $1.5 million fine that can be levied on companies by the Department of Health and Human Services for lax information security.

He advocates an ID system that would be voluntary, like the "Global Entry" system used at U.S. airports to speed immigration checks. In a voluntary system, consumers would need to approve the sharing of their information, which Halamka hopes they would in the interest of preventing the misuse of their information.

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Symantec folds nine Norton products into one service

Symantec will consolidate its cluttered Norton line of security software, folding nine products into one online service that can be used across desktop computers and mobile devices.

The product, in beta now, will simply be called "Norton Security" and cost $79 a year when it goes on sale in North America on Sept. 23, said Gerry Egan, senior director of product management. It replaces Norton Internet Security, Norton AntiVirus and Norton360, among others.

Symantec, one of the largest security vendors, has been working for more than a year to revise its product line as it faces strong competition in the low-margin consumer antivirus business.

Over the years, Symantec added new products as new threats emerged, but people had trouble figuring out which product was the right one for them.

"What we realized was we actually ended up confusing a lot of customers," Egan said.

While Norton Security will still be sold in retail stores, Symantec is bolstering its website as an entry point as that sales channel offers healthier returns for the company over others, Egan said. Symantec is also withdrawing from some of the deals that saw its software pre-installed on computers.

Overall, Symantec has aimed to make Norton Security an easy-to-manage online service along the lines of Netflix or iTunes. The user interface has been improved for simpler device management.

Consumers can sign up for a Norton Security online account and then download the appropriate product for Windows or Apple OS X computers, or Android or iOS mobile devices.

There will be a limit on the number of devices that Norton Security can be used on. The limit hasn't been determined yet, Egan said, but it will aim to prevent abuse and should be appropriate for most customers, he said.

Norton Security has the usual antivirus, antispyware and spam monitoring functions. Symantec will offer a cloud-based backup feature as an option.

Pricing for the backup feature hasn't been set yet, but Egan said it will be generally the same as in other Norton products, starting around $10 for 25 GB of storage.

Customers on versions of Norton due to be retired won't be forced off the old products, although Symantec will encourage them to move to the latest version, Egan said.

Egan said Symantec expects to release Norton Security in Europe around early October and then later in Asia Pacific.

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AMD announces Radeon R7 SSD product line, made by enthusiast manufacturer OCZ

AMD said Tuesday that it will sell three 2.5-inch SSDs manufactured by enthusiast house OCZ, allowing AMD to offer high-speed storage alongside microprocessors and graphics chips.

AMD will sell the three SSDs—sized at 120, 240, and 480 gigabytes, respectively—as Radeon R7 SSDs, tying them to its Radeon family of GPUs. OCZ, which was recently acquired by Toshiba, will actually make the drives, together with its own flash chips and controllers. 

Right now, AMD's new drives sit among the cream of the enthusiast SSD crop, with sequential read speeds of 545MB/sec and write speeds of 530 MB/sec. The number of random read I/O's per second (IOPS) clocks in at 100,000 IOPS, with 90,000 write IOPS. Perhaps more importantly, AMD is offering a four-year warranty that assumes users will write 30GB daily to the drive for each of those four years—far more than most users will likely do.

AMD is positioning the drive as an enthusiast part, right between the OCZ Vector 150 series SSD and the OCZ Vertex 460, a mainstream drive. The Radeon R7 drives will use the Barefoot 3 M00 controller, which supports 256-bit AES encryption, as well as Toshiba's A19 NAND flash. Under load, the drives will consume just 2.7 watts apiece, or 0.6 watts while idling.

"The AMD Radeon brand is synonymous with performance and quality amongst PC gamers," said Roman Kyrychynskyi, director of memory, at AMD, in a statement. "With the new AMD Radeon R7 Series SSDs powered by outstanding OCZ Storage Solutions IP, we bring that reputation to the SSD market with a series of drives that offer an ideal combination of performance, reliability and affordability—great for gamers building or upgrading a rig."

The new drives also give AMD the chance to counter longtime rival Intel, which was one of the early proponents, and manufacturers, of SSDs. (Recently, we tested Intel's 630 series enthusiast SSD and discovered that, by itself, it was only a middling performer.) Crucial, Kingston, Samsung, and SanDisk also offer competing enthusiast-class SSDs.

The prices of the Radeon R7 SSDs will begin at $100 for the 120GB model, AMD said. That's not a great price, as at press time you could buy the slightly slower Crucial M500 120GB SSD at Amazon for $74.99. Given AMD's branding, however, we'd say that an SSD/graphics card bundle might not be too far-fetched. 

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