http://www.pcworld.com en-us Fri, 13 Feb 2015 00:55:32 -0800 Fri, 13 Feb 2015 00:55:32 -0800 Thu, 12 Feb 2015 18:54:00 -0800 Katherine Noyes Katherine Noyes A "Dark Web" search engine developed by U.S. defense researchers is in the spotlight this week for its use in combating human-trafficking activities, but it could play a role in business, too. "There's huge potential," said Jeff Schneider, a research professor within the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon's School of Computer Science. Earlier this year, Carnegie Mellon was awarded a $3.6 million contract to collaborate on the project at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which is known as Memex. The Memex program—a three-year research initiative to develop software for domain-specific indexing of open, public Web content and domain-specific search capabilities—was highlighted on Sunday by a segment on 60 Minutes and an article in Scientific American. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here In addition to personal phone numbers and email addresses for hundreds of people who corresponded with him, there's something else inside the cache of emails that Jeb Bush released this week: computer viruses. Earlier this week, Bush, who some tip as a presidential hopeful, released thousands of emails from his time as governor of Florida, when he promoted his "jeb@jeb.org" email address as a way for voters to interact with him. The emails were released unredacted—a deliberate move intended to demonstrate transparency but one that backfired because the messages included the names, email addresses and phone numbers of thousands of people. Alongside a Web interface to read the emails, Bush also offered raw Microsoft Outlook files, and it's in those files where the viruses lurked in file attachments. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here What if you could complain directly to Google about every little thing that bothered you about the Android operating system? And what if every time you complained, Google fixed a bug just for you? The Chinese handset maker, Xiaomi, has built an empire of 100 million users worldwide on this exact premise. "We're an Internet company," said Bin Lin, President of Xiaomi, at a press event on Thursday. "We're not just interested in making handsets." While it's true that Xiaomi has been particularly successful selling directly to customers rather than through other retailers or carriers, that's not what Lin was referring to. He was boasting about the company's massive user base overseas, which has grown rapidly thanks to savvy social media tactics. "They are not our customers, they are our fans," added Hugo Barra, a former Google executive who left in 2012 to serve as Vice President of Global Operations at Xiaomi. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here A long-standing effort to extend privacy protections to email and other data in the cloud got new life Thursday when U.S. lawmakers introduced not one, but two bills to reform the country's electronic privacy laws. Both the Law Enforcement Access to Data Stored Abroad Act, called the LEADS Act, and the Electronic Communications Privacy Amendments Act would require law enforcement agencies to get court-ordered warrants to search data that's been stored on Web-based or cloud-based services for more than 180 days. Under the 29-year-old Electronic Communications Privacy Act [ECPA], law enforcement agencies do not need a court-ordered warrant to search unopened email stored with a vendor for longer than 180 days, although they do need court approval to access unopened email less than 180 days old. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here U.S.-based GeoPoll is partnering with Control Union, an international provider of agricultural inspection and safety services, to reach out to African farmers and bring them into global supply chain networks while ensuring compliance with standard business practices. GeoPoll provides technology for data collection, using mobile platforms for surveys. Control Union will be able to use GeoPoll technology to reach small-holding farmers to gain more information about their practices. The idea is to bring increased transparency to food supply chains globally, with a focus on key products such as cocoa, coffee, cotton, fruits and vegetables, palm oil, rice, and tobacco. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here LinkedIn is restricting access to most of its application programming interfaces (APIs) to companies that have struck up partnerships with the social networking company. "Over the past several years, we've seen some exciting applications from our developer community. While many delivered value back to our members and LinkedIn, not all have," wrote Adam Trachtenberg, director of the LinkedIn developer network, explaining in a blog post the change in the company's API policy. Starting May 12, LinkedIn will only offer a handful of its APIs for general use, namely those that allow users and companies to post information about themselves on the service. After then, only companies that have enrolled in LinkedIn's partner program will have API access. Samsung, WeChat, and Evernote have already struck such partnerships. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here The biggest Android smartphone maker most Americans have probably never heard of is taking its first step into the U.S. market. Xiaomi, which in just four years has gone from nothing to leading the Chinese market, will launch a U.S. version of its online shopping site later this year but it won't sell the low-cost, high-spec phones for which the company has gained its reputation. Instead, it will sell a selection of phone accessories like battery packs and headphones. That doesn't mean a U.S. launch of its phones has been ruled out, however. "The amount of effort to bring [smartphones and tablets] to market is significant," said Hugo Barra, the one-time Google executive who is now vice president for international markets at Xiaomi in Beijing. Barra, who was speaking to reporters in San Francisco, noted the various certifications required to sell products in each country, the need to strike deals with carriers and organize customer support. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here The speed at which Facebook responded to a reported security vulnerability shows how important photos have become to the site. The vulnerability could have allowed hackers to delete photos. An outside developer discovered the vulnerability in Facebook's Graph API, the primary way for outside developers to build apps and software that tap into Facebook's data. The developer, identifying himself as Laxman Muthiyah in a blog post published Thursday, said he was able to use a mobile access token for the API to delete photo albums that were not his. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here Apple is making progress in eliminating the use of materials that are linked to militant groups in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and neighboring countries. Since 2012 the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has required companies that use tantalum, tin, tungsten and gold in their products to issue a yearly report disclosing whether the minerals were obtained from Central African nations. In some cases, the profits from selling those materials, which have been given the name conflict minerals, can benefit warlords, rebels and other criminal organizations. These minerals are found in many tech products, including Apple's iPhone, iPad, Mac computers and Apple TV. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here French startup Infinit has released a Windows application for free file-sharing that uses peer-to-peer technology to improve transmission speeds. The release of the Windows client on Thursday comes after the company's launch of a Mac version in 2013. The two clients offer the same performance. Infinit's peer-to-peer technology, which does not require users to wait for files and folders to upload to the cloud before sharing them, makes the process of sharing all types of content between two people faster and easier than using services from the likes of Dropbox. Transfers are between five and 30 times faster than cloud-based solutions, and there is no limitation on the file sizes, Baptiste Fradin, co-founder and chief operating officer at Infinit, said in an interview last year when the company was still beta testing the Windows version. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here A wave of cyberattacks aimed at government-related websites in Nigeria, Ghana and Senegal over the last two months has triggered a debate over how to bolster online security and deal with politically motivated hacking. A popular Senegalese news site, Seneweb and the website of the government's ICT management agency, L'Agence De l'Informatique de l'Etat (ADIE), were the first to be hacked in the latest round of attacks, in December and January, respectively (though the Seneweb hack was not disclosed until January). The attacks were reportedly launched in response to Senegalese President Macky Sall's participation in a rally in support of the French magazine, Charlie Hebdo. Twelve people were killed on Jan. 7 by two heavily armed men at the Paris office of satirical news weekly Charlie Hebdo. The attack was reportedly prompted by satirical material involving Muslim themes and historical figures. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here Microsoft opened its Windows 10 Technical Preview for Phones on Thursday by supporting just midrange to lower-end devices, disappointing some early adopters who were hoping to try out Microsoft's new preview. Currently, just six phones can download the Windows 10 Technical Preview: the Lumia 630, 635, 636, 638, 730, and Lumia 830. Aside from the Lumia 830, Microsoft's "affordable flagship," the remainder are midrange Windows Phones that were released according to Microsoft's principle of driving Windows Phone market share by expanding its user base. "We are starting with a limited set of devices supported for this first preview," Gabe Aul, the engineering general manager at Microsoft who has been the point man for Windows 10, said in a blog post. "Windows 10 will drive innovation across screens of all sizes and we will have new hardware from Microsoft and our partners, including new flagship phones." To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here There's a new choir in town, but there are no humans to be found. Instead, some Google employees in Tokyo strung together 300 Android phones and tablets with Androidify characters to bellow out an arrangement of Ode to Joy. Check it out for yourself. Google is actually putting the choir on display in Tokyo on Tuesdays and Thursdays for anyone that wants to see it in person. For the rest of us, check out the YouTube video. It's adorable. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here How much cloud computing does your enterprise application need? Hewlett-Packard has some of the guesswork out of cloud procurement by adding seven new preconfigured options to its Helion set of cloud services. The Helion VPC (virtual private cloud) offerings are tailored to meet a range of computing requirements, from lighter workloads such as software development to more demanding jobs such as running complex ERP (enterprise resource planning) applications. The configurations are based on the data center and cloud usage that HP has found with its clients usage of the cloud, said Jeff Moyer, HP senior director of global infrastructure and hosting services. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here The White House heads west to Silicon Valley on Friday looking for ideas on how to improve the nation's cybersecurity, and members of President Barack Obama's administration are likely to get an earful. The White House's first-of-its-kind cybersecurity summit at Stanford University will feature remarks from Obama and from Apple CEO Tim Cook, but participants are likely to hear a range of ideas about how to improve cybersecurity at U.S. businesses. Scheduled panel discussions will focus on improving cybersecurity practices at consumer-facing businesses, on using cybersecurity as a business advantage, and on promoting secure payments. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here After acquiring a competitor weeks ago and just announcing plans to buy another one, Expedia may look like the dominant player in online travel, but its CEO argues the deals are necessary to battle another rival: Google. Expedia offers online booking services for flights, car rentals and hotels under brands such as Hotels.com and Hotwire.com, and plans to beef up its business with Thursday's $1.6 billion proposed acquisition of rival Orbitz, which offers similar services and operates sites such as CheapTickets.com. Snatching up Orbitz will give Expedia the customers it needs to fend off companies that have muscled their way into the online travel agency space, including Google, said Expedia CEO Dara Khosrowshahi during a webcast held to discuss the Orbitz deal. Google, along with traditional travel industry players like hotels, are all trying to establish themselves as the best option for consumers looking to book travel. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here Nokia's Here map is becoming a solid contender on Android, and the latest update adds some smart features to ease the pain of navigation. Here for Android is losing the beta tag and now displays 3D maps for shopping centers and airports in 70 different countries. Just like with Google Maps, you can touch on the different stores for more details or navigate through multiple floors with a sliding bar. Here now has 3-D maps of shopping centers and airports in 70 different countries. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here Tesla's crusade against fossil fuels could soon hit home with a battery-powered energy pack. The company plans to start producing a home battery within six months, Bloomberg reports, and will reveal more details in the next month or two. One obvious application would be a source for backup power, replacing conventional fuel-powered generators. The upcoming Toyota Mirai hydrogen-powered car can also function as a backup power source for a house. But the Tesla pack could also help shift energy usage to reduce peak demand on the electric grid, thereby cutting down on energy bills. In an earnings call, Tesla Chief Technology Officer JB Straubel hinted at strong interest from utility companies for that very reason. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here If you've been waiting for the technical preview of Windows Phone 10 to drop, today's the day. Microsoft's Gabriel Aul tweeted Thursday morning that the the release would be pushed out today, and then indicated that it will be sooner, rather than later. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here ]]> http://www.pcworld.com/article/2883651/heads-up-microsoft-to-preview-windows-10-for-phones-today.html#tk.rss_all Windows Thu, 12 Feb 2015 09:40:11 -0800 Agam Shah Agam Shah Just days after settling with the Chinese government over claims it abused its market dominance, Qualcomm may be investigated in South Korea over the same issue. South Korea's Fair Trade Commission is considering an investigation into Qualcomm's business practices, the Wall Street Journal reported, but did not provide additional details. A Qualcomm spokesman declined to comment. The possible probe would likely look at Qualcomm's practices in licensing its Snapdragon chip, and wireless and modem technologies. Qualcomm earlier this week was fined US$975 million by China for overcharging licensees in the country, and in 2009 was fined $200 million by the South Korea Fair Trade Commission. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here Sling TV has been promising an app for Amazon's Fire TV since last month, and now it's arrived with some big sign-up incentives. In exchange for three months of prepaid Sling TV service at $20 per month, you can either get a free Fire TV Stick (regularly $39) or $50 off the Fire TV set-top box (regularly $99). If you already have the hardware, Sling says you can download the app and get "a special Amazon offer for Sling TV." The official Fire TV release comes just a few days after Sling started blocking sideloaded versions of the app on the Fire TV and on Android television dongles. Android users will still have to run an older version, though Sling is working on an official release for Android TV devices such as Google's Nexus Player. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here Amazon's firing up the blue light again, and this it's time giving away $140 worth of paid Android apps and games. The ad-free version of the red hot Trivia Crack is free, and normally costs $2.99. Another good deal is OfficeSuite Professional, an app that edits Word, Excel, and PowerPoint compatible files and typically is $20. While Office for Android tablets is finally here and rather solid, it can't hurt to check out this longstanding editing suite. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here VirusTotal, a Google-owned online malware scanning service, is creating a whitelist of products from large software vendors to reduce bad detections by antivirus programs. False positive detections are common in the antivirus industry. They occur when a benign program is wrongfully flagged as malicious due to an overly broad detection signature or algorithm used in an antivirus product. VirusTotal, which scans suspicious files uploaded by users with products from 48 antivirus vendors, invited large software makers Tuesday to add metadata about their products' files to a new database maintained by the company. If a file that's later uploaded by users to be scanned with VirusTotal is in that database, the scan report will display a "trusted source" alert. If any antivirus products flagged the file as malicious during the scan, their detections will be considered false positives and will not be counted toward the final detection score. Vendors of the products that flagged the file as malware will be notified so that they can correct the error. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here Social media star is an actual job title now, with so-called influencers raking in tens of thousands a month to craft tweets, Vines, and other content for paying brands. Twitter sees this activity and has decided it wants a cut: The company just bought Niche, a talent agency and analytics firm that connects some 6,000 top content creators with advertisers. Now Twitter and its 6-second video-looping service Vine, where some of social media's biggest stars were born, control the connection between creators and brands that want to make ads that don't seem like ads. That means the company presumably gets a cut when popular Viners signed to Niche make clips for brands. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here Microsoft is rolling out improvements to Office Online that add more features to the web-based productivity suite and make some already-existing features more readily available. Most of the changes span the entire suite, but there are a few improvements that are specific to Word. Here's what's new. The reading view in Office Online has always been very basic—little more than an annoying extra step to pass through before editing your document, really. With the new updates, Microsoft is making reading view a little more useful, first by switching the options interface to the right side of the screen instead of the left. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here Facebook is giving users more control over their social networking afterlives with a "legacy contact" setting. With this setting enabled, a designated heir can change the deceased user's profile picture, pin a memorial letter to the top of the profile, and respond to friend requests. The legacy contact can also download an archive of photos and posts. However, Facebook is making clear that this is not the same as handing over your password. Legacy contacts won't be able to edit old posts, access private messages or delete the entire account. Facebook told the Wall Street Journal that it ruled out further access "for this first version," and noted that adding more responsibilities could just hinder the grieving process. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here Fitbit is back in the news again for skin irritation problems nearly a year after the company was forced to initiate a product recall for a similar issue. This time around, however, the rashes doesn't appear to be as widespread as the those that compelled Fitbit to recall the Force last February. Nevertheless, the complaints are back. ABC 7 News in San Francisco said it uncovered more than 200 instances of complaints on social media. In December, Yahoo tech columnist Alyssa Bereznak also said she ended up with a rash from the Fitbit Charge. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here Ramanathan wants to stream video from his laptop to his HDTV. But his laptop doesn't have an HDMI port. You can have an Internet-ready smart TV with a Roku plugged into it, and at some point you'll want to watch something that neither of them support. (For me, it's password-protected Vimeo streams.) That's when you need to plug your laptop directly into your HDTV. If your laptop lacks an HDMI port, connecting it to a TV isn't so easy. But it isn't incredibly difficult either. It's all a matter of figuring out which ports you do have and which adapters you need. [Have a tech question? Ask PCWorld Contributing Editor Lincoln Spector. Send your query to answer@pcworld.com.] To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here The Android smart watch's time may not yet have come: Despite heavy promotion of Android Wear, Google's hardware partners, including LG Electronics, Motorola Mobility and Samsung Electronics, only shipped 720,000 of the devices last year. With the arrival of products such as Motorola's hotly anticipated Moto 360, the smartwatch market was expected to take off. But the data from market research company Canalys shows that consumers are still far from convinced that they need buy one. "Android Wear will need to improve significantly in the future, and we believe it will do so," said Daniel Matte, analyst at Canalys. Those improvements have to happen across the board, including a better user interface and improved battery life, according to Francisco Jeronimo, research director for European mobile devices at IDC. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here Apple and Pinterest are teaming up to help you discover apps with a new type of pin on the social bulletin board that leads to the App Store. App pins are a type of rich pin, which offers more information than a typical pin that consists solely of an image with a link to the original source. Pinterest developed rich pins two years ago and now supports detailed, contextual pins for recipes, places, articles, products, movies, and—with Apple's help—apps. If you're browsing Pinterest on an iOS device and come across an app pin, the platform will give you the option to install the app directly to your iPhone or iPad. To help Pinterest launch app pins, Apple has curated a collection of lifestyle apps ranging from healthy recipe services to apps for New York Fashion Week. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Nokia More Reading View
How it works
http://www.pcworld.com en-us Fri, 13 Feb 2015 00:55:32 -0800 Fri, 13 Feb 2015 00:55:32 -0800 Thu, 12 Feb 2015 18:54:00 -0800 Katherine Noyes Katherine Noyes A "Dark Web" search engine developed by U.S. defense researchers is in the spotlight this week for its use in combating human-trafficking activities, but it could play a role in business, too. "There's huge potential," said Jeff Schneider, a research professor within the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon's School of Computer Science. Earlier this year, Carnegie Mellon was awarded a $3.6 million contract to collaborate on the project at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which is known as Memex. The Memex program—a three-year research initiative to develop software for domain-specific indexing of open, public Web content and domain-specific search capabilities—was highlighted on Sunday by a segment on 60 Minutes and an article in Scientific American. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here In addition to personal phone numbers and email addresses for hundreds of people who corresponded with him, there's something else inside the cache of emails that Jeb Bush released this week: computer viruses. Earlier this week, Bush, who some tip as a presidential hopeful, released thousands of emails from his time as governor of Florida, when he promoted his "jeb@jeb.org" email address as a way for voters to interact with him. The emails were released unredacted—a deliberate move intended to demonstrate transparency but one that backfired because the messages included the names, email addresses and phone numbers of thousands of people. Alongside a Web interface to read the emails, Bush also offered raw Microsoft Outlook files, and it's in those files where the viruses lurked in file attachments. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here What if you could complain directly to Google about every little thing that bothered you about the Android operating system? And what if every time you complained, Google fixed a bug just for you? The Chinese handset maker, Xiaomi, has built an empire of 100 million users worldwide on this exact premise. "We're an Internet company," said Bin Lin, President of Xiaomi, at a press event on Thursday. "We're not just interested in making handsets." While it's true that Xiaomi has been particularly successful selling directly to customers rather than through other retailers or carriers, that's not what Lin was referring to. He was boasting about the company's massive user base overseas, which has grown rapidly thanks to savvy social media tactics. "They are not our customers, they are our fans," added Hugo Barra, a former Google executive who left in 2012 to serve as Vice President of Global Operations at Xiaomi. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here A long-standing effort to extend privacy protections to email and other data in the cloud got new life Thursday when U.S. lawmakers introduced not one, but two bills to reform the country's electronic privacy laws. Both the Law Enforcement Access to Data Stored Abroad Act, called the LEADS Act, and the Electronic Communications Privacy Amendments Act would require law enforcement agencies to get court-ordered warrants to search data that's been stored on Web-based or cloud-based services for more than 180 days. Under the 29-year-old Electronic Communications Privacy Act [ECPA], law enforcement agencies do not need a court-ordered warrant to search unopened email stored with a vendor for longer than 180 days, although they do need court approval to access unopened email less than 180 days old. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here U.S.-based GeoPoll is partnering with Control Union, an international provider of agricultural inspection and safety services, to reach out to African farmers and bring them into global supply chain networks while ensuring compliance with standard business practices. GeoPoll provides technology for data collection, using mobile platforms for surveys. Control Union will be able to use GeoPoll technology to reach small-holding farmers to gain more information about their practices. The idea is to bring increased transparency to food supply chains globally, with a focus on key products such as cocoa, coffee, cotton, fruits and vegetables, palm oil, rice, and tobacco. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here LinkedIn is restricting access to most of its application programming interfaces (APIs) to companies that have struck up partnerships with the social networking company. "Over the past several years, we've seen some exciting applications from our developer community. While many delivered value back to our members and LinkedIn, not all have," wrote Adam Trachtenberg, director of the LinkedIn developer network, explaining in a blog post the change in the company's API policy. Starting May 12, LinkedIn will only offer a handful of its APIs for general use, namely those that allow users and companies to post information about themselves on the service. After then, only companies that have enrolled in LinkedIn's partner program will have API access. Samsung, WeChat, and Evernote have already struck such partnerships. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here The biggest Android smartphone maker most Americans have probably never heard of is taking its first step into the U.S. market. Xiaomi, which in just four years has gone from nothing to leading the Chinese market, will launch a U.S. version of its online shopping site later this year but it won't sell the low-cost, high-spec phones for which the company has gained its reputation. Instead, it will sell a selection of phone accessories like battery packs and headphones. That doesn't mean a U.S. launch of its phones has been ruled out, however. "The amount of effort to bring [smartphones and tablets] to market is significant," said Hugo Barra, the one-time Google executive who is now vice president for international markets at Xiaomi in Beijing. Barra, who was speaking to reporters in San Francisco, noted the various certifications required to sell products in each country, the need to strike deals with carriers and organize customer support. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here The speed at which Facebook responded to a reported security vulnerability shows how important photos have become to the site. The vulnerability could have allowed hackers to delete photos. An outside developer discovered the vulnerability in Facebook's Graph API, the primary way for outside developers to build apps and software that tap into Facebook's data. The developer, identifying himself as Laxman Muthiyah in a blog post published Thursday, said he was able to use a mobile access token for the API to delete photo albums that were not his. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here Apple is making progress in eliminating the use of materials that are linked to militant groups in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and neighboring countries. Since 2012 the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has required companies that use tantalum, tin, tungsten and gold in their products to issue a yearly report disclosing whether the minerals were obtained from Central African nations. In some cases, the profits from selling those materials, which have been given the name conflict minerals, can benefit warlords, rebels and other criminal organizations. These minerals are found in many tech products, including Apple's iPhone, iPad, Mac computers and Apple TV. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here French startup Infinit has released a Windows application for free file-sharing that uses peer-to-peer technology to improve transmission speeds. The release of the Windows client on Thursday comes after the company's launch of a Mac version in 2013. The two clients offer the same performance. Infinit's peer-to-peer technology, which does not require users to wait for files and folders to upload to the cloud before sharing them, makes the process of sharing all types of content between two people faster and easier than using services from the likes of Dropbox. Transfers are between five and 30 times faster than cloud-based solutions, and there is no limitation on the file sizes, Baptiste Fradin, co-founder and chief operating officer at Infinit, said in an interview last year when the company was still beta testing the Windows version. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here A wave of cyberattacks aimed at government-related websites in Nigeria, Ghana and Senegal over the last two months has triggered a debate over how to bolster online security and deal with politically motivated hacking. A popular Senegalese news site, Seneweb and the website of the government's ICT management agency, L'Agence De l'Informatique de l'Etat (ADIE), were the first to be hacked in the latest round of attacks, in December and January, respectively (though the Seneweb hack was not disclosed until January). The attacks were reportedly launched in response to Senegalese President Macky Sall's participation in a rally in support of the French magazine, Charlie Hebdo. Twelve people were killed on Jan. 7 by two heavily armed men at the Paris office of satirical news weekly Charlie Hebdo. The attack was reportedly prompted by satirical material involving Muslim themes and historical figures. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here Microsoft opened its Windows 10 Technical Preview for Phones on Thursday by supporting just midrange to lower-end devices, disappointing some early adopters who were hoping to try out Microsoft's new preview. Currently, just six phones can download the Windows 10 Technical Preview: the Lumia 630, 635, 636, 638, 730, and Lumia 830. Aside from the Lumia 830, Microsoft's "affordable flagship," the remainder are midrange Windows Phones that were released according to Microsoft's principle of driving Windows Phone market share by expanding its user base. "We are starting with a limited set of devices supported for this first preview," Gabe Aul, the engineering general manager at Microsoft who has been the point man for Windows 10, said in a blog post. "Windows 10 will drive innovation across screens of all sizes and we will have new hardware from Microsoft and our partners, including new flagship phones." To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here There's a new choir in town, but there are no humans to be found. Instead, some Google employees in Tokyo strung together 300 Android phones and tablets with Androidify characters to bellow out an arrangement of Ode to Joy. Check it out for yourself. Google is actually putting the choir on display in Tokyo on Tuesdays and Thursdays for anyone that wants to see it in person. For the rest of us, check out the YouTube video. It's adorable. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here How much cloud computing does your enterprise application need? Hewlett-Packard has some of the guesswork out of cloud procurement by adding seven new preconfigured options to its Helion set of cloud services. The Helion VPC (virtual private cloud) offerings are tailored to meet a range of computing requirements, from lighter workloads such as software development to more demanding jobs such as running complex ERP (enterprise resource planning) applications. The configurations are based on the data center and cloud usage that HP has found with its clients usage of the cloud, said Jeff Moyer, HP senior director of global infrastructure and hosting services. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here The White House heads west to Silicon Valley on Friday looking for ideas on how to improve the nation's cybersecurity, and members of President Barack Obama's administration are likely to get an earful. The White House's first-of-its-kind cybersecurity summit at Stanford University will feature remarks from Obama and from Apple CEO Tim Cook, but participants are likely to hear a range of ideas about how to improve cybersecurity at U.S. businesses. Scheduled panel discussions will focus on improving cybersecurity practices at consumer-facing businesses, on using cybersecurity as a business advantage, and on promoting secure payments. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here After acquiring a competitor weeks ago and just announcing plans to buy another one, Expedia may look like the dominant player in online travel, but its CEO argues the deals are necessary to battle another rival: Google. Expedia offers online booking services for flights, car rentals and hotels under brands such as Hotels.com and Hotwire.com, and plans to beef up its business with Thursday's $1.6 billion proposed acquisition of rival Orbitz, which offers similar services and operates sites such as CheapTickets.com. Snatching up Orbitz will give Expedia the customers it needs to fend off companies that have muscled their way into the online travel agency space, including Google, said Expedia CEO Dara Khosrowshahi during a webcast held to discuss the Orbitz deal. Google, along with traditional travel industry players like hotels, are all trying to establish themselves as the best option for consumers looking to book travel. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here Nokia's Here map is becoming a solid contender on Android, and the latest update adds some smart features to ease the pain of navigation. Here for Android is losing the beta tag and now displays 3D maps for shopping centers and airports in 70 different countries. Just like with Google Maps, you can touch on the different stores for more details or navigate through multiple floors with a sliding bar. Here now has 3-D maps of shopping centers and airports in 70 different countries. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here Tesla's crusade against fossil fuels could soon hit home with a battery-powered energy pack. The company plans to start producing a home battery within six months, Bloomberg reports, and will reveal more details in the next month or two. One obvious application would be a source for backup power, replacing conventional fuel-powered generators. The upcoming Toyota Mirai hydrogen-powered car can also function as a backup power source for a house. But the Tesla pack could also help shift energy usage to reduce peak demand on the electric grid, thereby cutting down on energy bills. In an earnings call, Tesla Chief Technology Officer JB Straubel hinted at strong interest from utility companies for that very reason. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here If you've been waiting for the technical preview of Windows Phone 10 to drop, today's the day. Microsoft's Gabriel Aul tweeted Thursday morning that the the release would be pushed out today, and then indicated that it will be sooner, rather than later. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here ]]> http://www.pcworld.com/article/2883651/heads-up-microsoft-to-preview-windows-10-for-phones-today.html#tk.rss_all Windows Thu, 12 Feb 2015 09:40:11 -0800 Agam Shah Agam Shah Just days after settling with the Chinese government over claims it abused its market dominance, Qualcomm may be investigated in South Korea over the same issue. South Korea's Fair Trade Commission is considering an investigation into Qualcomm's business practices, the Wall Street Journal reported, but did not provide additional details. A Qualcomm spokesman declined to comment. The possible probe would likely look at Qualcomm's practices in licensing its Snapdragon chip, and wireless and modem technologies. Qualcomm earlier this week was fined US$975 million by China for overcharging licensees in the country, and in 2009 was fined $200 million by the South Korea Fair Trade Commission. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here Sling TV has been promising an app for Amazon's Fire TV since last month, and now it's arrived with some big sign-up incentives. In exchange for three months of prepaid Sling TV service at $20 per month, you can either get a free Fire TV Stick (regularly $39) or $50 off the Fire TV set-top box (regularly $99). If you already have the hardware, Sling says you can download the app and get "a special Amazon offer for Sling TV." The official Fire TV release comes just a few days after Sling started blocking sideloaded versions of the app on the Fire TV and on Android television dongles. Android users will still have to run an older version, though Sling is working on an official release for Android TV devices such as Google's Nexus Player. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here Amazon's firing up the blue light again, and this it's time giving away $140 worth of paid Android apps and games. The ad-free version of the red hot Trivia Crack is free, and normally costs $2.99. Another good deal is OfficeSuite Professional, an app that edits Word, Excel, and PowerPoint compatible files and typically is $20. While Office for Android tablets is finally here and rather solid, it can't hurt to check out this longstanding editing suite. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here VirusTotal, a Google-owned online malware scanning service, is creating a whitelist of products from large software vendors to reduce bad detections by antivirus programs. False positive detections are common in the antivirus industry. They occur when a benign program is wrongfully flagged as malicious due to an overly broad detection signature or algorithm used in an antivirus product. VirusTotal, which scans suspicious files uploaded by users with products from 48 antivirus vendors, invited large software makers Tuesday to add metadata about their products' files to a new database maintained by the company. If a file that's later uploaded by users to be scanned with VirusTotal is in that database, the scan report will display a "trusted source" alert. If any antivirus products flagged the file as malicious during the scan, their detections will be considered false positives and will not be counted toward the final detection score. Vendors of the products that flagged the file as malware will be notified so that they can correct the error. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here Social media star is an actual job title now, with so-called influencers raking in tens of thousands a month to craft tweets, Vines, and other content for paying brands. Twitter sees this activity and has decided it wants a cut: The company just bought Niche, a talent agency and analytics firm that connects some 6,000 top content creators with advertisers. Now Twitter and its 6-second video-looping service Vine, where some of social media's biggest stars were born, control the connection between creators and brands that want to make ads that don't seem like ads. That means the company presumably gets a cut when popular Viners signed to Niche make clips for brands. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here Microsoft is rolling out improvements to Office Online that add more features to the web-based productivity suite and make some already-existing features more readily available. Most of the changes span the entire suite, but there are a few improvements that are specific to Word. Here's what's new. The reading view in Office Online has always been very basic—little more than an annoying extra step to pass through before editing your document, really. With the new updates, Microsoft is making reading view a little more useful, first by switching the options interface to the right side of the screen instead of the left. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here Facebook is giving users more control over their social networking afterlives with a "legacy contact" setting. With this setting enabled, a designated heir can change the deceased user's profile picture, pin a memorial letter to the top of the profile, and respond to friend requests. The legacy contact can also download an archive of photos and posts. However, Facebook is making clear that this is not the same as handing over your password. Legacy contacts won't be able to edit old posts, access private messages or delete the entire account. Facebook told the Wall Street Journal that it ruled out further access "for this first version," and noted that adding more responsibilities could just hinder the grieving process. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here Fitbit is back in the news again for skin irritation problems nearly a year after the company was forced to initiate a product recall for a similar issue. This time around, however, the rashes doesn't appear to be as widespread as the those that compelled Fitbit to recall the Force last February. Nevertheless, the complaints are back. ABC 7 News in San Francisco said it uncovered more than 200 instances of complaints on social media. In December, Yahoo tech columnist Alyssa Bereznak also said she ended up with a rash from the Fitbit Charge. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here Ramanathan wants to stream video from his laptop to his HDTV. But his laptop doesn't have an HDMI port. You can have an Internet-ready smart TV with a Roku plugged into it, and at some point you'll want to watch something that neither of them support. (For me, it's password-protected Vimeo streams.) That's when you need to plug your laptop directly into your HDTV. If your laptop lacks an HDMI port, connecting it to a TV isn't so easy. But it isn't incredibly difficult either. It's all a matter of figuring out which ports you do have and which adapters you need. [Have a tech question? Ask PCWorld Contributing Editor Lincoln Spector. Send your query to answer@pcworld.com.] To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here The Android smart watch's time may not yet have come: Despite heavy promotion of Android Wear, Google's hardware partners, including LG Electronics, Motorola Mobility and Samsung Electronics, only shipped 720,000 of the devices last year. With the arrival of products such as Motorola's hotly anticipated Moto 360, the smartwatch market was expected to take off. But the data from market research company Canalys shows that consumers are still far from convinced that they need buy one. "Android Wear will need to improve significantly in the future, and we believe it will do so," said Daniel Matte, analyst at Canalys. Those improvements have to happen across the board, including a better user interface and improved battery life, according to Francisco Jeronimo, research director for European mobile devices at IDC. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here Apple and Pinterest are teaming up to help you discover apps with a new type of pin on the social bulletin board that leads to the App Store. App pins are a type of rich pin, which offers more information than a typical pin that consists solely of an image with a link to the original source. Pinterest developed rich pins two years ago and now supports detailed, contextual pins for recipes, places, articles, products, movies, and—with Apple's help—apps. If you're browsing Pinterest on an iOS device and come across an app pin, the platform will give you the option to install the app directly to your iPhone or iPad. To help Pinterest launch app pins, Apple has curated a collection of lifestyle apps ranging from healthy recipe services to apps for New York Fashion Week. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click hereNokia More Reading View
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