Written By Unknown on Selasa, 22 Juli 2014 | 16.00
The public cloud offers extra features like automated offsite backup – but did you know you can get these things and more with a private cloud solution as well? Here's a look at three ways private NAS setups are becoming a preferable option for small businesses.
Opening the Door for Affordable Virtualization Services
NAS has come a long way since its origin as a system for secure, on-site data storage. Today's NAS devices can serve as platforms for virtualization services that would otherwise require expensive and complex hardware to manage. The opportunity to take advantage of NAS as a more economic alternative to a pricey contract with a company like VMWare is a huge benefit for small businesses.
QNAP's Virtualization Station allows you to create virtualized desktops that run Windows, Linux, or Unix operating systems and manage them all from one simple interface. You can assign separate network resources to each virtual machine, and create snapshots of each virtual machine's status at any point in time. If a VM experiences a failure, you can quickly roll things back to an earlier environment. The biggest advantages to using NAS for virtualization are cost (virtualization is built right into the NAS) and safety (file transfers are delivered within the LAN, instead of over the Internet).
Security and Stability You Can Trust
When it comes to ensuring your data is safely stored, it simply doesn't get any better than using a QNAP Turbo NAS. Public cloud services have recently come under fire for breaches caused by hackers and lengthy service outages that have left customers unable to access their data for hours. With a locally hosted NAS device, uptime is no longer a question mark, and your data is always accessible rather than potentially held hostage by the vagaries of the unstable Internet.
Furthermore, your data is always protected by multiple security measures while it resides on your NAS. Sensitive files are encrypted, and unapproved IP addresses are automatically locked out by Turbo NAS software. Integrated antivirus detection (with email notification) and full military-grade encryption on both internally and externally connected hard drives give you excellent all-around protection from security breaches and malware.
NAS Boosts the Benefits of the Public Cloud
Public cloud services like Microsoft Azure and Amazon S3 are convenient ways to add storage on a pay-as-you-go basis. But setting up these services on multiple client computers can be complicated and time-consuming. More importantly, when you're finished, you're left with only a single cloud-based copy of your data as a backup.
With QNAP Turbo NAS, you can use Azure and S3 directly through your own private QNAP hardware. With S3 and Azure - both available as apps for the QNAP Turbo NAS - you simply back up data from your network directly to your Turbo NAS, then use the app to make a secondary backup that's sent to Azure or S3. That way, you maintain a local copy of your data on your own network, and a second copy resides in the public cloud, letting you double down on backup security. These apps even increase your level of data protection through the addition of client-side encryption and the ability to restore accidentally deleted data.
Public cloud and private cloud services can coexist, working hand in hand to ensure your company's data is safer, easier to manage, and faster to access. You can reap the benefits of each by using the public cloud where it makes sense, but leveraging the cost savings and superior speed of a NAS-based private cloud to pull off many of the same tricks more sensibly.
A presentation on a low-budget method to unmask users of a popular online privacy tool, TOR, will no longer go ahead at the Black Hat security conference early next month.
The talk was nixed by the legal counsel with Carnegie Mellon's Software Engineering Institute after a finding that materials from researcher Alexander Volynkin were not approved for public release, according to a notice on the conference's website.
It's rare but not unprecedented for Black Hat presentations to be cancelled. It was not clear why lawyers felt Volynkin's presentation should not proceed.
Volynkin, a research scientist with the university's Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT) was due to give a talk entitled "You Don't Have to be the NSA to Break Tor: Deanonymizing Users on a Budget" at the conference, which take places Aug. 6-7 in Last Vegas.
TOR is short for The Onion Router, which is a network of distributed nodes that provide greater privacy by encrypting a person's browsing traffic and routing that traffic through random proxy servers. Although originally developed by the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, it is now maintained by The TOR Project.
TOR is widely used by both cybercriminals and those with legitimate interests in preserving their anonymity, such as dissidents and journalists. Although TOR masks a computer's true IP address, advanced attacks have been developed that undermine its effectiveness.
Some of Volynkin's materials were informally shared with The TOR Project, a nonprofit group that oversees the TOR, wrote Roger Dingledine, a co-founder of the organization, in mailing list post on Monday.
The TOR Project did not request the talk to be canceled, Dingledine wrote. Also, the group has not received slides or descriptions of Volynkin's talk that go beyond an abstract that has now been deleted from Black Hat's website.
Dingledine wrote that The TOR Project is working with CERT to do a coordinated disclosure around Volynkin's findings, possibly later this week. In general, the group encourages researchers to responsibly disclose information about new attacks.
"Researchers who have told us about bugs in the past have found us pretty helpful in fixing issues and generally positive to work with," Dingledine wrote.
Things always live fast and die young in the blink-and-you'll-miss world of consumer technology, but the past week was an especially brutal one for a wide range of devices and services. Killed products topped the headlines on an daily basis—many, but not all, stemming from Microsoft's plan to cut 18,000 jobs, including half (yes, half) of the Nokia staff it so recently acquired.
To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
"We enjoy killing the player," says Karl Roelofs, a fiendish grin lighting up his face.
Roelofs and his friend Dave Marsh were responsible for creating Shadowgate, one of the earliest graphical point-and-click adventure gamess, for the Macintosh way back in 1987. Now, a quarter of a century later and with the help of some 3,500 Kickstarter backers, Roelofs and Marsh are returning to the dark halls of Castle Shadowgate.
"A few years ago when Doublefine was getting the ground going with retro games on Kickstarter Dave and I looked at each other and said, 'Why not? Why not do Shadowgate right?'" says Roelofs.
To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
]]> http://www.pcworld.com/article/2454552/shadowgate-preview-inside-the-modern-rebirth-of-a-point-and-click-adventure-classic.html#tk.rss_all Gaming Games Fri, 18 Jul 2014 13:55:13 -0700 Juan Carlos Perez, IDG News Service Juan Carlos Perez, IDG News Service
Microsoft has been screaming "cloud" in many partners' deaf ears for several years, but the company found a more receptive audience at this week's Worldwide Partner Conference.
From CEO Satya Nadella on down, all Microsoft officials at the event told attendees that they need to switch their businesses to the cloud urgently, or else risk obsolescence and market defeat.
"You need to get on this train. This market is being made now," a vehement and adrenaline-drenched Kevin Turner—Microsoft's COO—said during a WPC keynote, adding that Microsoft doesn't have enough partners selling its cloud services anywhere in the world.
To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Chrome evangelist François Beaufort gave us a glimpse of the potential future of Chrome OS on Friday, and boy is it ugly.
Maybe that's a bit harsh. The lone screenshot Beaufort provided of the "Athena project" is clearly in its early days; the developer fully warns that the Chromium team is still experimenting with it. "The first draft consists in a collection of windows with some simple window management," he wrote on Google+.
Even so, it's hard to look at.
The first look at Project Athena for Chrome OS mashes up Material Design with the feel of Apple's Time Machine. (Click to enlarge.)
To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
]]> http://www.pcworld.com/article/2455151/google-reveals-athena-a-material-design-inspired-revamp-of-chrome-os.html#tk.rss_all Chromebooks Operating Systems Fri, 18 Jul 2014 13:35:13 -0700 Stephen Lawson Stephen Lawson
A breakthrough by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology could change the way Web and mobile apps are written and help companies like Facebook keep the cat videos coming.
Their main innovation is a new way to decide when each packet can scurry across a data center to its destination. The software that the MIT team developed, called Fastpass, uses parallel computing to make those decisions almost as soon as the packets arrive at each switch. They think Fastpass may show up in production data centers in about two years.
In today's networks, packets can spend a lot of their time in big, memory-intensive queues, lined up like tourists at Disney World. That's because switches mostly decide on their own when each packet can go on to its destination, and they do so with limited information. Fastpass gives that job to a central server, called an arbiter, that can look at a whole segment of the data center and schedule packets in a more efficient way, according to Hari Balakrishnan, MIT's Fujitsu Professor in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. He co-wrote a paper that will be presented at an Association for Computing Machinery conference next month. The co-authors included Facebook researcher Hans Fugal.
To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
]]> http://www.pcworld.com/article/2456180/mit-invention-to-speed-up-data-centers-should-cheer-developers.html#tk.rss_all Networking Fri, 18 Jul 2014 13:25:17 -0700 Grant Gross Grant Gross
The U.S government can take action to slow the calls in other countries to abandon U.S. tech vendors following revelations about widespread National Security Agency surveillance, some tech representatives said Friday.
Decisions by other governments to move their residents' data away from the U.S. are hurting tech vendors, but Congress can take steps to "rebuild the trust" in the U.S. as a responsible Internet leader, said Kevin Bankston, policy director of the New America Foundation's Open Technology Institute.
Still, other governments will continue to try to use the NSA revelations by former agency contractor Edward Snowden to their advantage, said panelists at a Congressional Internet Caucus discussion on the effect of NSA surveillance on U.S. businesses.
To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
]]> http://www.pcworld.com/article/2456163/us-needs-to-restore-trust-following-nsa-revelations-tech-groups-say.html#tk.rss_all Government Networking Security Privacy Fri, 18 Jul 2014 13:25:15 -0700 Marc Ferranti Marc Ferranti
With Google, IBM, SAP, Intel and other tech titans reporting earnings this week, the focus is again on mobile and cloud technology. The general trend appears to be that the further a tech vendor has moved away from its legacy desktop-oriented products, the better its earnings are.
IBM has launched ambitious cloud and mobile initiatives—but the resulting products are not quite fully baked. IBM officials themselves acknowledge as much, with IBM CEO Ginni Rometty talking about "positioning ourselves for growth over the long term" in the company's earnings release Thursday.
Earlier this year, IBM announced a global competition to encourage developers to create mobile consumer and business apps powered by its Watson supercomputer platform. Just this week, IBM and Apple said they are teaming up to create business apps for Apple's mobile phones and tablets.
To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
]]> http://www.pcworld.com/article/2456160/wall-street-beat-transition-to-mobile-cloud-hits-tech-earnings.html#tk.rss_all Business Issues Fri, 18 Jul 2014 13:20:00 -0700 Agam Shah Agam Shah Refunds for returned products will be issued in real currency
My sides are so sore from laughing. The video game industry lost its collective minds this week and decided to deliver unto you the most ridiculous set of news possible. Seriously, we've got an infamous dictator suing over misuse of his image, Flappy Bird running on an Apple IIe, and Fred Durst streaming video games on Twitch in between recording vocal tracks for a new Limp Bizkit album. Surely this is the end of days—as evidenced by the reveal of a new Doom game.
Here's all the video game news for the week of July 14. I'll leave out the "fit to print" part this week.
It'll never stop
That Flappy Bird port train just keeps on chugging. Developer Dagen Brock ported the game to the Apple II this week, thereby causing a rift in the space-time continuum and unleashing the hordes of demons waiting just outside the fabric of our world.
To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
In case the headline didn't tip you off: Yep, you can buy Dell products with Bitcoin now, as Michael Dell himself proudly trumpeted on Twitter earlier today.
System administrators take note: That mobile employee expense app you're building should be every bit as easy to use as Facebook. Oh, and you better deliver it quickly too, because that's how Facebook rolls.
Increasingly, organizations are finding that they need to build mobile apps for their employees in this hyper-connected world. Because employees are probably already used to Twitter, Facebook, Google Maps and other consumer-friendly apps, they'll expect a high degree of polish and performance from their enterprise apps as well.
"As consumers become more familiar with mobile experiences, they are bringing those expectations into the enterprise and expecting the enterprises to move just as fast," said Jeff Haynie, co-founder and CEO of Appcelerator, which offers a set of software and services for building, testing and managing mobile applications.
To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
I wrote yesterday about a report from Microsoft researchers, which goes against established password security best practices. The new guidance from the Microsoft researchers makes sense to me, because it fits how I handle password management already. However, at least one security expert feels that there is a fatal flaw that makes the new password advice impractical: You.
Almost every aspect of computer security and privacy seems to come back to that one fundamental issue. You—the user—are the weakest link in the security chain. No matter how effective a security process or tool has the potential to be, user error can undermine the whole thing and render the security useless.
To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Plans to favor some Internet packets over others threaten consumers' hard-won right to use encryption, a digital privacy advocate says.
Activists and tech companies fended off efforts in the U.S. in the 1990s to ban Internet encryption or give the government ways around it, but an even bigger battle over cryptography is brewing now, according to Sascha Meinrath, director of X-Lab, a digital civil-rights think tank launched earlier this year. One of the most contested issues in that battle will be net neutrality, Meinrath said.
The new fight will be even more fierce than the last one, because Internet service providers now see dollars and cents in the details of packets traversing their networks. They want to charge content providers for priority delivery of their packets across the network, something that a controversial Federal Communications Commission proposal could allow under certain conditions. Friday is the filing deadline for the first round of public comments on that plan.
To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Editor's note: This article was originally published 7/17/14 but was updated 7/18/14 with NPD's sales numbers for the PlayStation 4.
We're still waiting on the NPD research group to release its monthly console sales estimates later today (see update at bottom --ed.), but Microsoft got so excited last night that it couldn't wait any longer, showering in confetti and those little popper things where you pull on the string and they explode—people are finally buying the Xbox One!
"Since the new Xbox One offering launched on June 9th, we've seen sales of Xbox One more than double in the US, compared to sales in May," Microsoft wrote in a blog post. The "new Xbox One offering" refers, of course, to the model where they stripped out the controversial Kinect peripheral and dropped the price from $500 to a more competitive $400.
To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
One of the best features of Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 is the ability to pin apps to the Taskbar. Until Microsoft comes out with the refreshed Start menu, pinning apps is a must for Windows 8.1 users.
As the go-to location for dealing with and switching between open programs, the Taskbar may be the most clickable location on your desktop. But there's no reason you can't spice it up with a few keyboard tricks to make things a little more efficient.
Pick by number
If you have a bunch of apps pinned to your taskbar, the keyboard offers a quick way to fire up or switch to a program without reaching for your mouse.
To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Researchers are gearing up to hack an array of different home routers during a contest next month at the Defcon 22 security conference.
The contest is called SOHOpelessly Broken—a nod to the small office/home office space targeted by the products—and follows a growing number of large scale attacks this year against routers and other home embedded systems.
The competition is organized by security consultancy firm Independent Security Evaluators and advocacy group the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), and will have two separate challenges.
The first challenge, known as Track 0, will require researchers to demonstrate exploits for previously unknown, or zero-day, vulnerabilities in a number of popular off-the-shelf consumer wireless routers.
To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
As Microsoft looks to slim down with layoffs and restructuring, Nokia is spinning MixRadio into a separate steaming music company.
While the app will still come preloaded on Windows Phones, it will also come to Android and iOS, according to The Guardian. There's no word on when the spin-off will be finalized, or when the apps will become available on other platforms.
It's also unclear whether MixRadio will look to include ads in its app now that it's no longer an exclusive perk for Nokia phone owners. Currently, the app is ad-free, but users can get higher audio quality, offline listening and unlimited song skipping for $4 per month.
To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
]]> http://www.pcworld.com/article/2455962/downsizing-microsoft-to-spin-off-nokias-mixradio-music-service.html#tk.rss_all Fri, 18 Jul 2014 08:00:00 -0700 Ian Paul Ian Paul
Dropbox is a very popular cloud storage service, but NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden is no fan. In a recent interview with The Guardian, Snowden called Dropbox a "targeted, wannabe PRISM partner" that is "very hostile to privacy."
Snowden also isn't happy about Dropbox's decision in April to add former U.S. Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice to its Board of Directors. Snowden called Rice "probably the most anti-privacy official you can imagine."
To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
]]> http://www.pcworld.com/article/2455215/edward-snowden-dropbox-is-hostile-to-privacy.html#tk.rss_all Privacy Storage Cloud & Services Fri, 18 Jul 2014 07:23:00 -0700 Jared Newman Jared Newman Amazon's new subscription e-book plan includes more than 600,000 titles, but no major publishers. http://www.techhive.com/article/2455114/kindle-unlimited-launches-600-000-all-you-can-read-e-books-for-10-per-month.html#tk.rss_all Books software Fri, 18 Jul 2014 07:05:11 -0700 Lucian Constantin Lucian Constantin
Romanian and French authorities have dismantled a cybercriminal network that infected computers at money transfer outlets across Europe and used them to perform illegal transactions.
The gang was also involved in the theft of credit card details through skimming, credit card cloning, money laundering and drug trafficking, Europol announced Thursday.
The gang, which was composed mostly of Romanian citizens, infected computers at copy shops that also operated as money transfer franchises in Austria, Belgium, Germany, Norway, the U.K. and other European countries. No details were released about how the computers were infected, but Europol said that the attackers used a remote access Trojan (RAT) program.
To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Written By Unknown on Minggu, 20 Juli 2014 | 16.00
Things always live fast and die young in the blink-and-you'll-miss world of consumer technology, but the past week was an especially brutal one for a wide range of devices and services. Killed products topped the headlines on an daily basis—many, but not all, stemming from Microsoft's plan to cut 18,000 jobs, including half (yes, half) of the Nokia staff it so recently acquired.
To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
"We enjoy killing the player," says Karl Roelofs, a fiendish grin lighting up his face.
Roelofs and his friend Dave Marsh were responsible for creating Shadowgate, one of the earliest graphical point-and-click adventure gamess, for the Macintosh way back in 1987. Now, a quarter of a century later and with the help of some 3,500 Kickstarter backers, Roelofs and Marsh are returning to the dark halls of Castle Shadowgate.
"A few years ago when Doublefine was getting the ground going with retro games on Kickstarter Dave and I looked at each other and said, 'Why not? Why not do Shadowgate right?'" says Roelofs.
To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
]]> http://www.pcworld.com/article/2454552/shadowgate-preview-inside-the-modern-rebirth-of-a-point-and-click-adventure-classic.html#tk.rss_all Gaming Games Fri, 18 Jul 2014 13:55:13 -0700 Juan Carlos Perez, IDG News Service Juan Carlos Perez, IDG News Service
Microsoft has been screaming "cloud" in many partners' deaf ears for several years, but the company found a more receptive audience at this week's Worldwide Partner Conference.
From CEO Satya Nadella on down, all Microsoft officials at the event told attendees that they need to switch their businesses to the cloud urgently, or else risk obsolescence and market defeat.
"You need to get on this train. This market is being made now," a vehement and adrenaline-drenched Kevin Turner—Microsoft's COO—said during a WPC keynote, adding that Microsoft doesn't have enough partners selling its cloud services anywhere in the world.
To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Chrome evangelist François Beaufort gave us a glimpse of the potential future of Chrome OS on Friday, and boy is it ugly.
Maybe that's a bit harsh. The lone screenshot Beaufort provided of the "Athena project" is clearly in its early days; the developer fully warns that the Chromium team is still experimenting with it. "The first draft consists in a collection of windows with some simple window management," he wrote on Google+.
Even so, it's hard to look at.
The first look at Project Athena for Chrome OS mashes up Material Design with the feel of Apple's Time Machine. (Click to enlarge.)
To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
]]> http://www.pcworld.com/article/2455151/google-reveals-athena-a-material-design-inspired-revamp-of-chrome-os.html#tk.rss_all Chromebooks Operating Systems Fri, 18 Jul 2014 13:35:13 -0700 Stephen Lawson Stephen Lawson
A breakthrough by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology could change the way Web and mobile apps are written and help companies like Facebook keep the cat videos coming.
Their main innovation is a new way to decide when each packet can scurry across a data center to its destination. The software that the MIT team developed, called Fastpass, uses parallel computing to make those decisions almost as soon as the packets arrive at each switch. They think Fastpass may show up in production data centers in about two years.
In today's networks, packets can spend a lot of their time in big, memory-intensive queues, lined up like tourists at Disney World. That's because switches mostly decide on their own when each packet can go on to its destination, and they do so with limited information. Fastpass gives that job to a central server, called an arbiter, that can look at a whole segment of the data center and schedule packets in a more efficient way, according to Hari Balakrishnan, MIT's Fujitsu Professor in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. He co-wrote a paper that will be presented at an Association for Computing Machinery conference next month. The co-authors included Facebook researcher Hans Fugal.
To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
]]> http://www.pcworld.com/article/2456180/mit-invention-to-speed-up-data-centers-should-cheer-developers.html#tk.rss_all Networking Fri, 18 Jul 2014 13:25:17 -0700 Grant Gross Grant Gross
The U.S government can take action to slow the calls in other countries to abandon U.S. tech vendors following revelations about widespread National Security Agency surveillance, some tech representatives said Friday.
Decisions by other governments to move their residents' data away from the U.S. are hurting tech vendors, but Congress can take steps to "rebuild the trust" in the U.S. as a responsible Internet leader, said Kevin Bankston, policy director of the New America Foundation's Open Technology Institute.
Still, other governments will continue to try to use the NSA revelations by former agency contractor Edward Snowden to their advantage, said panelists at a Congressional Internet Caucus discussion on the effect of NSA surveillance on U.S. businesses.
To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
]]> http://www.pcworld.com/article/2456163/us-needs-to-restore-trust-following-nsa-revelations-tech-groups-say.html#tk.rss_all Government Networking Security Privacy Fri, 18 Jul 2014 13:25:15 -0700 Marc Ferranti Marc Ferranti
With Google, IBM, SAP, Intel and other tech titans reporting earnings this week, the focus is again on mobile and cloud technology. The general trend appears to be that the further a tech vendor has moved away from its legacy desktop-oriented products, the better its earnings are.
IBM has launched ambitious cloud and mobile initiatives—but the resulting products are not quite fully baked. IBM officials themselves acknowledge as much, with IBM CEO Ginni Rometty talking about "positioning ourselves for growth over the long term" in the company's earnings release Thursday.
Earlier this year, IBM announced a global competition to encourage developers to create mobile consumer and business apps powered by its Watson supercomputer platform. Just this week, IBM and Apple said they are teaming up to create business apps for Apple's mobile phones and tablets.
To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
]]> http://www.pcworld.com/article/2456160/wall-street-beat-transition-to-mobile-cloud-hits-tech-earnings.html#tk.rss_all Business Issues Fri, 18 Jul 2014 13:20:00 -0700 Agam Shah Agam Shah Refunds for returned products will be issued in real currency
My sides are so sore from laughing. The video game industry lost its collective minds this week and decided to deliver unto you the most ridiculous set of news possible. Seriously, we've got an infamous dictator suing over misuse of his image, Flappy Bird running on an Apple IIe, and Fred Durst streaming video games on Twitch in between recording vocal tracks for a new Limp Bizkit album. Surely this is the end of days—as evidenced by the reveal of a new Doom game.
Here's all the video game news for the week of July 14. I'll leave out the "fit to print" part this week.
It'll never stop
That Flappy Bird port train just keeps on chugging. Developer Dagen Brock ported the game to the Apple II this week, thereby causing a rift in the space-time continuum and unleashing the hordes of demons waiting just outside the fabric of our world.
To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
In case the headline didn't tip you off: Yep, you can buy Dell products with Bitcoin now, as Michael Dell himself proudly trumpeted on Twitter earlier today.
System administrators take note: That mobile employee expense app you're building should be every bit as easy to use as Facebook. Oh, and you better deliver it quickly too, because that's how Facebook rolls.
Increasingly, organizations are finding that they need to build mobile apps for their employees in this hyper-connected world. Because employees are probably already used to Twitter, Facebook, Google Maps and other consumer-friendly apps, they'll expect a high degree of polish and performance from their enterprise apps as well.
"As consumers become more familiar with mobile experiences, they are bringing those expectations into the enterprise and expecting the enterprises to move just as fast," said Jeff Haynie, co-founder and CEO of Appcelerator, which offers a set of software and services for building, testing and managing mobile applications.
To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
I wrote yesterday about a report from Microsoft researchers, which goes against established password security best practices. The new guidance from the Microsoft researchers makes sense to me, because it fits how I handle password management already. However, at least one security expert feels that there is a fatal flaw that makes the new password advice impractical: You.
Almost every aspect of computer security and privacy seems to come back to that one fundamental issue. You—the user—are the weakest link in the security chain. No matter how effective a security process or tool has the potential to be, user error can undermine the whole thing and render the security useless.
To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Plans to favor some Internet packets over others threaten consumers' hard-won right to use encryption, a digital privacy advocate says.
Activists and tech companies fended off efforts in the U.S. in the 1990s to ban Internet encryption or give the government ways around it, but an even bigger battle over cryptography is brewing now, according to Sascha Meinrath, director of X-Lab, a digital civil-rights think tank launched earlier this year. One of the most contested issues in that battle will be net neutrality, Meinrath said.
The new fight will be even more fierce than the last one, because Internet service providers now see dollars and cents in the details of packets traversing their networks. They want to charge content providers for priority delivery of their packets across the network, something that a controversial Federal Communications Commission proposal could allow under certain conditions. Friday is the filing deadline for the first round of public comments on that plan.
To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Editor's note: This article was originally published 7/17/14 but was updated 7/18/14 with NPD's sales numbers for the PlayStation 4.
We're still waiting on the NPD research group to release its monthly console sales estimates later today (see update at bottom --ed.), but Microsoft got so excited last night that it couldn't wait any longer, showering in confetti and those little popper things where you pull on the string and they explode—people are finally buying the Xbox One!
"Since the new Xbox One offering launched on June 9th, we've seen sales of Xbox One more than double in the US, compared to sales in May," Microsoft wrote in a blog post. The "new Xbox One offering" refers, of course, to the model where they stripped out the controversial Kinect peripheral and dropped the price from $500 to a more competitive $400.
To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
One of the best features of Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 is the ability to pin apps to the Taskbar. Until Microsoft comes out with the refreshed Start menu, pinning apps is a must for Windows 8.1 users.
As the go-to location for dealing with and switching between open programs, the Taskbar may be the most clickable location on your desktop. But there's no reason you can't spice it up with a few keyboard tricks to make things a little more efficient.
Pick by number
If you have a bunch of apps pinned to your taskbar, the keyboard offers a quick way to fire up or switch to a program without reaching for your mouse.
To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Researchers are gearing up to hack an array of different home routers during a contest next month at the Defcon 22 security conference.
The contest is called SOHOpelessly Broken—a nod to the small office/home office space targeted by the products—and follows a growing number of large scale attacks this year against routers and other home embedded systems.
The competition is organized by security consultancy firm Independent Security Evaluators and advocacy group the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), and will have two separate challenges.
The first challenge, known as Track 0, will require researchers to demonstrate exploits for previously unknown, or zero-day, vulnerabilities in a number of popular off-the-shelf consumer wireless routers.
To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
As Microsoft looks to slim down with layoffs and restructuring, Nokia is spinning MixRadio into a separate steaming music company.
While the app will still come preloaded on Windows Phones, it will also come to Android and iOS, according to The Guardian. There's no word on when the spin-off will be finalized, or when the apps will become available on other platforms.
It's also unclear whether MixRadio will look to include ads in its app now that it's no longer an exclusive perk for Nokia phone owners. Currently, the app is ad-free, but users can get higher audio quality, offline listening and unlimited song skipping for $4 per month.
To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
]]> http://www.pcworld.com/article/2455962/downsizing-microsoft-to-spin-off-nokias-mixradio-music-service.html#tk.rss_all Fri, 18 Jul 2014 08:00:00 -0700 Ian Paul Ian Paul
Dropbox is a very popular cloud storage service, but NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden is no fan. In a recent interview with The Guardian, Snowden called Dropbox a "targeted, wannabe PRISM partner" that is "very hostile to privacy."
Snowden also isn't happy about Dropbox's decision in April to add former U.S. Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice to its Board of Directors. Snowden called Rice "probably the most anti-privacy official you can imagine."
To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
]]> http://www.pcworld.com/article/2455215/edward-snowden-dropbox-is-hostile-to-privacy.html#tk.rss_all Privacy Storage Cloud & Services Fri, 18 Jul 2014 07:23:00 -0700 Jared Newman Jared Newman Amazon's new subscription e-book plan includes more than 600,000 titles, but no major publishers. http://www.techhive.com/article/2455114/kindle-unlimited-launches-600-000-all-you-can-read-e-books-for-10-per-month.html#tk.rss_all Books software Fri, 18 Jul 2014 07:05:11 -0700 Lucian Constantin Lucian Constantin
Romanian and French authorities have dismantled a cybercriminal network that infected computers at money transfer outlets across Europe and used them to perform illegal transactions.
The gang was also involved in the theft of credit card details through skimming, credit card cloning, money laundering and drug trafficking, Europol announced Thursday.
The gang, which was composed mostly of Romanian citizens, infected computers at copy shops that also operated as money transfer franchises in Austria, Belgium, Germany, Norway, the U.K. and other European countries. No details were released about how the computers were infected, but Europol said that the attackers used a remote access Trojan (RAT) program.
To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
]]> http://www.pcworld.com/article/2455940/romanian-gang-used-malware-to-defraud-international-money-transfer-firms.html#tk.rss_all Security Legal Fri, 18 Jul 2014 07:00:00 -0700 Loek Essers Loek Essers Apple maintained that its parental controls 'go far beyond the features of others in the industry.' http://www.macworld.com/article/2455880/european-commission-slams-apple-for-in-app-purchase-policies.html#tk.rss_all Government
PCWorldUnder Google, robot maker reduces dependence on military fundingCloud message resonating with Microsoft partnersGoogle reveals Athena, a Material Design-inspired revamp of Chrome OSMIT invention to speed up data centers should cheer developersUS needs to restore trust following NSA revelations, tech groups sayWall Street Beat: Transition to mobile, cloud hits tech earningsDell accepting Bitcoin paymentsMissing Pieces: Doom is back, so is the Apple IIe, and other must-know gaming newsDude, you're getting a Dell, with BitcoinGoogle to stop calling games that offer in-app purchases 'free'D-Wave wants more real-world deployments for its quantum computerAppcelerator gears up for the business worldBy the numbers: How Kindle Unlimited compares to other ebook subscriptionsMicrosoft password research has fatal flawNet neutrality a key battleground in growing fight over encryption, activists sayGoogle Maps update adds bicycle route elevations, voice commandsXbox One sales 'more than double' after intro of $400 Kinect-less model, still can't top the PS4Get more out of the Windows Taskbar with these 3 shortcutsHealbe finally releases lab data for its notorious GoBe calorie-tracking wristbandHome router security to be tested in upcoming hacking contestDownsizing Microsoft to spin off Nokia's MixRadio music serviceEdward Snowden: Dropbox is 'hostile to privacy'Kindle Unlimited launches: 600,000 all-you-can-read e-books for $10 per monthRomanian gang used malware to defraud international money transfer firmsEuropean Commission slams Apple for in-app purchase policiesVerizon blaming Netflix for slow streaming speeds is an 'attempt at deception' says Internet backbone providerBaidu launches search engine for BrazilAndroid Influencer: Pushbullet CEO Ryan OldenburgUK rushes through surveillance bill, extending data retention rulesComparing the Android L settings to KitKat
A company acquired by Google that develops robots for the U.S. military appears to have greatly reduced its dependence on government funding, suggesting a reluctance on Google's part to align itself too closely with military projects.
When Google acquired Boston Dynamics last December, some questioned whether the firm's military focus conflicted with Google's pledge of "don't be evil" and the virtuous image it nurtures for itself.
"Google search and destroy," quipped the U.K.'s Independent newspaper. "The internet giant (motto: 'Don't be evil') has bought a pioneer of scary robot animals. Can its ethics survive?"
To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
]]> http://www.pcworld.com/article/2456240/under-google-robot-maker-reduces-dependence-on-military-funding.html#tk.rss_all Fri, 18 Jul 2014 13:55:13 -0700 Juan Carlos Perez, IDG News Service Juan Carlos Perez, IDG News Service
Microsoft has been screaming "cloud" in many partners' deaf ears for several years, but the company found a more receptive audience at this week's Worldwide Partner Conference.
From CEO Satya Nadella on down, all Microsoft officials at the event told attendees that they need to switch their businesses to the cloud urgently, or else risk obsolescence and market defeat.
"You need to get on this train. This market is being made now," a vehement and adrenaline-drenched Kevin Turner—Microsoft's COO—said during a WPC keynote, adding that Microsoft doesn't have enough partners selling its cloud services anywhere in the world.
To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Chrome evangelist François Beaufort gave us a glimpse of the potential future of Chrome OS on Friday, and boy is it ugly.
Maybe that's a bit harsh. The lone screenshot Beaufort provided of the "Athena project" is clearly in its early days; the developer fully warns that the Chromium team is still experimenting with it. "The first draft consists in a collection of windows with some simple window management," he wrote on Google+.
Even so, it's hard to look at.
The first look at Project Athena for Chrome OS mashes up Material Design with the feel of Apple's Time Machine. (Click to enlarge.)
To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
]]> http://www.pcworld.com/article/2455151/google-reveals-athena-a-material-design-inspired-revamp-of-chrome-os.html#tk.rss_all Chromebooks Operating Systems Fri, 18 Jul 2014 13:35:13 -0700 Stephen Lawson Stephen Lawson
A breakthrough by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology could change the way Web and mobile apps are written and help companies like Facebook keep the cat videos coming.
Their main innovation is a new way to decide when each packet can scurry across a data center to its destination. The software that the MIT team developed, called Fastpass, uses parallel computing to make those decisions almost as soon as the packets arrive at each switch. They think Fastpass may show up in production data centers in about two years.
In today's networks, packets can spend a lot of their time in big, memory-intensive queues, lined up like tourists at Disney World. That's because switches mostly decide on their own when each packet can go on to its destination, and they do so with limited information. Fastpass gives that job to a central server, called an arbiter, that can look at a whole segment of the data center and schedule packets in a more efficient way, according to Hari Balakrishnan, MIT's Fujitsu Professor in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. He co-wrote a paper that will be presented at an Association for Computing Machinery conference next month. The co-authors included Facebook researcher Hans Fugal.
To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
]]> http://www.pcworld.com/article/2456180/mit-invention-to-speed-up-data-centers-should-cheer-developers.html#tk.rss_all Networking Fri, 18 Jul 2014 13:25:17 -0700 Grant Gross Grant Gross
The U.S government can take action to slow the calls in other countries to abandon U.S. tech vendors following revelations about widespread National Security Agency surveillance, some tech representatives said Friday.
Decisions by other governments to move their residents' data away from the U.S. are hurting tech vendors, but Congress can take steps to "rebuild the trust" in the U.S. as a responsible Internet leader, said Kevin Bankston, policy director of the New America Foundation's Open Technology Institute.
Still, other governments will continue to try to use the NSA revelations by former agency contractor Edward Snowden to their advantage, said panelists at a Congressional Internet Caucus discussion on the effect of NSA surveillance on U.S. businesses.
To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
]]> http://www.pcworld.com/article/2456163/us-needs-to-restore-trust-following-nsa-revelations-tech-groups-say.html#tk.rss_all Government Networking Security Privacy Fri, 18 Jul 2014 13:25:15 -0700 Marc Ferranti Marc Ferranti
With Google, IBM, SAP, Intel and other tech titans reporting earnings this week, the focus is again on mobile and cloud technology. The general trend appears to be that the further a tech vendor has moved away from its legacy desktop-oriented products, the better its earnings are.
IBM has launched ambitious cloud and mobile initiatives—but the resulting products are not quite fully baked. IBM officials themselves acknowledge as much, with IBM CEO Ginni Rometty talking about "positioning ourselves for growth over the long term" in the company's earnings release Thursday.
Earlier this year, IBM announced a global competition to encourage developers to create mobile consumer and business apps powered by its Watson supercomputer platform. Just this week, IBM and Apple said they are teaming up to create business apps for Apple's mobile phones and tablets.
To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
]]> http://www.pcworld.com/article/2456160/wall-street-beat-transition-to-mobile-cloud-hits-tech-earnings.html#tk.rss_all Business Issues Fri, 18 Jul 2014 13:20:00 -0700 Agam Shah Agam Shah Refunds for returned products will be issued in real currency
To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
My sides are so sore from laughing. The video game industry lost its collective minds this week and decided to deliver unto you the most ridiculous set of news possible. Seriously, we've got an infamous dictator suing over misuse of his image, Flappy Bird running on an Apple IIe, and Fred Durst streaming video games on Twitch in between recording vocal tracks for a new Limp Bizkit album. Surely this is the end of days—as evidenced by the reveal of a new Doom game.
Here's all the video game news for the week of July 14. I'll leave out the "fit to print" part this week.
It'll never stop
That Flappy Bird port train just keeps on chugging. Developer Dagen Brock ported the game to the Apple II this week, thereby causing a rift in the space-time continuum and unleashing the hordes of demons waiting just outside the fabric of our world.
To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
In case the headline didn't tip you off: Yep, you can buy Dell products with Bitcoin now, as Michael Dell himself proudly trumpeted on Twitter earlier today.
]]> http://www.pcworld.com/article/2456060/dwave-wants-more-realworld-deployments-for-its-quantum-computer.html#tk.rss_all Business Issues Fri, 18 Jul 2014 11:30:15 -0700 Joab Jackson Joab Jackson
System administrators take note: That mobile employee expense app you're building should be every bit as easy to use as Facebook. Oh, and you better deliver it quickly too, because that's how Facebook rolls.
Increasingly, organizations are finding that they need to build mobile apps for their employees in this hyper-connected world. Because employees are probably already used to Twitter, Facebook, Google Maps and other consumer-friendly apps, they'll expect a high degree of polish and performance from their enterprise apps as well.
"As consumers become more familiar with mobile experiences, they are bringing those expectations into the enterprise and expecting the enterprises to move just as fast," said Jeff Haynie, co-founder and CEO of Appcelerator, which offers a set of software and services for building, testing and managing mobile applications.
To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
]]> http://www.pcworld.com/article/2456040/appcelerator-gears-up-for-the-business-world.html#tk.rss_all Development Fri, 18 Jul 2014 11:00:00 -0700 James Careless James Careless We look at how Amazon's new ebook subscription service stacks up against similar offerings from Oyster and Scribd in terms of publisher deals, number of books, and the number of books you'll actually want to read. http://www.techhive.com/article/2455479/by-the-numbers-how-kindle-unlimited-compares-to-other-ebook-subscriptions.html#tk.rss_all Books software Web Apps Fri, 18 Jul 2014 11:00:00 -0700 Tony Bradley Tony Bradley
I wrote yesterday about a report from Microsoft researchers, which goes against established password security best practices. The new guidance from the Microsoft researchers makes sense to me, because it fits how I handle password management already. However, at least one security expert feels that there is a fatal flaw that makes the new password advice impractical: You.
Almost every aspect of computer security and privacy seems to come back to that one fundamental issue. You—the user—are the weakest link in the security chain. No matter how effective a security process or tool has the potential to be, user error can undermine the whole thing and render the security useless.
To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
]]> http://www.pcworld.com/article/2455478/microsoft-password-research-has-fatal-flaw.html#tk.rss_all Fri, 18 Jul 2014 10:50:10 -0700 Stephen Lawson Stephen Lawson
Plans to favor some Internet packets over others threaten consumers' hard-won right to use encryption, a digital privacy advocate says.
Activists and tech companies fended off efforts in the U.S. in the 1990s to ban Internet encryption or give the government ways around it, but an even bigger battle over cryptography is brewing now, according to Sascha Meinrath, director of X-Lab, a digital civil-rights think tank launched earlier this year. One of the most contested issues in that battle will be net neutrality, Meinrath said.
The new fight will be even more fierce than the last one, because Internet service providers now see dollars and cents in the details of packets traversing their networks. They want to charge content providers for priority delivery of their packets across the network, something that a controversial Federal Communications Commission proposal could allow under certain conditions. Friday is the filing deadline for the first round of public comments on that plan.
To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
]]> http://www.pcworld.com/article/2456000/net-neutrality-a-key-battleground-in-growing-fight-over-encryption-activists-say.html#tk.rss_all Security Encryption Privacy Government Fri, 18 Jul 2014 10:37:00 -0700 Derek Walter Derek Walter Version 8.2 includes interface tweaks and better visibility for Uber users http://www.greenbot.com/article/2455137/google-maps-update-adds-bicycle-route-elevations-voice-commands.html#tk.rss_all Apps Fri, 18 Jul 2014 10:30:00 -0700 Hayden Dingman Hayden Dingman
Editor's note: This article was originally published 7/17/14 but was updated 7/18/14 with NPD's sales numbers for the PlayStation 4.
We're still waiting on the NPD research group to release its monthly console sales estimates later today (see update at bottom --ed.), but Microsoft got so excited last night that it couldn't wait any longer, showering in confetti and those little popper things where you pull on the string and they explode—people are finally buying the Xbox One!
"Since the new Xbox One offering launched on June 9th, we've seen sales of Xbox One more than double in the US, compared to sales in May," Microsoft wrote in a blog post. The "new Xbox One offering" refers, of course, to the model where they stripped out the controversial Kinect peripheral and dropped the price from $500 to a more competitive $400.
To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
]]> http://www.pcworld.com/article/2455466/xbox-one-sales-more-than-double-after-intro-of-400-kinect-less-model.html#tk.rss_all Gaming Fri, 18 Jul 2014 09:42:00 -0700 Ian Paul Ian Paul
One of the best features of Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 is the ability to pin apps to the Taskbar. Until Microsoft comes out with the refreshed Start menu, pinning apps is a must for Windows 8.1 users.
As the go-to location for dealing with and switching between open programs, the Taskbar may be the most clickable location on your desktop. But there's no reason you can't spice it up with a few keyboard tricks to make things a little more efficient.
Pick by number
If you have a bunch of apps pinned to your taskbar, the keyboard offers a quick way to fire up or switch to a program without reaching for your mouse.
To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
]]> http://www.pcworld.com/article/2455091/get-more-out-of-the-windows-taskbar-with-these-3-shortcuts.html#tk.rss_all Windows Fri, 18 Jul 2014 09:38:00 -0700 Jon Phillips Jon Phillips According to its lab report, the wrist-worn wearable can detect the calories in the food you eat with an error rate of 13.5 percent. But this comes via a blog post, not a peer-reviewed study. http://www.techhive.com/article/2455961/healbe-finally-releases-lab-data-for-its-notorious-gobe-calorie-tracking-wristband.html#tk.rss_all Gadgets Fri, 18 Jul 2014 09:20:00 -0700 Lucian Constantin Lucian Constantin
Researchers are gearing up to hack an array of different home routers during a contest next month at the Defcon 22 security conference.
The contest is called SOHOpelessly Broken—a nod to the small office/home office space targeted by the products—and follows a growing number of large scale attacks this year against routers and other home embedded systems.
The competition is organized by security consultancy firm Independent Security Evaluators and advocacy group the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), and will have two separate challenges.
The first challenge, known as Track 0, will require researchers to demonstrate exploits for previously unknown, or zero-day, vulnerabilities in a number of popular off-the-shelf consumer wireless routers.
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]]> http://www.pcworld.com/article/2455980/home-router-security-to-be-tested-in-upcoming-hacking-contest.html#tk.rss_all Networking Security Fri, 18 Jul 2014 08:43:00 -0700 Jared Newman Jared Newman
As Microsoft looks to slim down with layoffs and restructuring, Nokia is spinning MixRadio into a separate steaming music company.
While the app will still come preloaded on Windows Phones, it will also come to Android and iOS, according to The Guardian. There's no word on when the spin-off will be finalized, or when the apps will become available on other platforms.
It's also unclear whether MixRadio will look to include ads in its app now that it's no longer an exclusive perk for Nokia phone owners. Currently, the app is ad-free, but users can get higher audio quality, offline listening and unlimited song skipping for $4 per month.
To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
]]> http://www.pcworld.com/article/2455962/downsizing-microsoft-to-spin-off-nokias-mixradio-music-service.html#tk.rss_all Fri, 18 Jul 2014 08:00:00 -0700 Ian Paul Ian Paul
Dropbox is a very popular cloud storage service, but NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden is no fan. In a recent interview with The Guardian, Snowden called Dropbox a "targeted, wannabe PRISM partner" that is "very hostile to privacy."
Snowden also isn't happy about Dropbox's decision in April to add former U.S. Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice to its Board of Directors. Snowden called Rice "probably the most anti-privacy official you can imagine."
To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
]]> http://www.pcworld.com/article/2455215/edward-snowden-dropbox-is-hostile-to-privacy.html#tk.rss_all Privacy Storage Cloud & Services Fri, 18 Jul 2014 07:23:00 -0700 Jared Newman Jared Newman Amazon's new subscription e-book plan includes more than 600,000 titles, but no major publishers. http://www.techhive.com/article/2455114/kindle-unlimited-launches-600-000-all-you-can-read-e-books-for-10-per-month.html#tk.rss_all Books software Fri, 18 Jul 2014 07:05:11 -0700 Lucian Constantin Lucian Constantin
Romanian and French authorities have dismantled a cybercriminal network that infected computers at money transfer outlets across Europe and used them to perform illegal transactions.
The gang was also involved in the theft of credit card details through skimming, credit card cloning, money laundering and drug trafficking, Europol announced Thursday.
The gang, which was composed mostly of Romanian citizens, infected computers at copy shops that also operated as money transfer franchises in Austria, Belgium, Germany, Norway, the U.K. and other European countries. No details were released about how the computers were infected, but Europol said that the attackers used a remote access Trojan (RAT) program.
To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
]]> http://www.pcworld.com/article/2455940/romanian-gang-used-malware-to-defraud-international-money-transfer-firms.html#tk.rss_all Security Legal Fri, 18 Jul 2014 07:00:00 -0700 Loek Essers Loek Essers Apple maintained that its parental controls 'go far beyond the features of others in the industry.' http://www.macworld.com/article/2455880/european-commission-slams-apple-for-in-app-purchase-policies.html#tk.rss_all Government Fri, 18 Jul 2014 06:42:00 -0700 Ian Paul Ian Paul
The Internet just got its back(bone) up over Verizon's recent finger pointing that blamed Netflix for poor streaming speeds on the ISP's network. Level 3, one of Netflix's Internet traffic carriers as well as one of the major 'Tier 1' networks that help serve as the backbone of the Internet, said Verizon's reasoning is nonsense and an "attempt at deception" that backfired.
In fact, Verizon is deliberately constraining capacity from network providers like Level 3, Mark Taylor, Level 3's vice president of content and media, said in a recent blog post.
To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
]]> http://www.pcworld.com/article/2455212/verizon-blaming-netflix-for-slow-streaming-speeds-is-an-attempt-at-deception-says-internet-backbone.html#tk.rss_all Fri, 18 Jul 2014 06:40:11 -0700 Michael Kan Michael Kan
China's Baidu is stepping into another major market with a search engine geared for Brazil, and is preparing to set up a research and development center in the country.
The search engine formally launched on Friday. With a Portuguese language interface, it offers Web, image and video search, along with a link to Baidu's "Postbar" product, an online forum.
The Brazil site marks Baidu's first international move in search since its Japan search engine launched in 2007.
The company has long led in its home market as China's largest search provider, with a 60 percent share, according to Internet analytics site CNZZ.com. But Baidu has yet to achieve that kind of success in Japan, where Yahoo and Google reign.
To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
]]> http://www.pcworld.com/article/2455900/baidu-launches-search-engine-for-brazil.html#tk.rss_all Productivity Fri, 18 Jul 2014 05:30:00 -0700 Florence Ion Florence Ion The man behind one of Android's most popular apps talks development, why he got into the Android app game, and what he loves about developing for Google's mobile platform. http://www.greenbot.com/article/2454941/android-influencer-pushbullet-ceo-ryan-oldenburg.html#tk.rss_all Apps Fri, 18 Jul 2014 05:10:11 -0700 Loek Essers Loek Essers
The U.K. government has pushed through a new surveillance law to replace one a European Union court said interfered with fundamental privacy rights—but, say civil rights campaigners, the new law is worse than the one it replaces.
The Data Retention and Investigatory Powers Act 2014, also known as DRIP, was fast-tracked by the U.K. government after European Union laws requiring communications providers to retain metadata were ruled invalid by the Court of Justice of the EU (CJEU) in April because they seriously interfered with fundamental privacy rights.
To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
]]> http://www.pcworld.com/article/2455860/uk-rushes-through-surveillance-bill-extending-data-retention-rules.html#tk.rss_all Legal Government Fri, 18 Jul 2014 04:00:00 -0700 Blake Stimac Blake Stimac The settings menus in Android L get a fresh look and a few tweaks, but aren't as different as you would expect. http://www.greenbot.com/article/2455160/comparing-the-android-l-settings-to-kitkat.html#tk.rss_all Android
PCWorldUnder Google, robot maker reduces dependence on military fundingCloud message resonating with Microsoft partnersGoogle reveals Athena, a Material Design-inspired revamp of Chrome OSMIT invention to speed up data centers should cheer developersUS needs to restore trust following NSA revelations, tech groups sayWall Street Beat: Transition to mobile, cloud hits tech earningsDell accepting Bitcoin paymentsMissing Pieces: Doom is back, so is the Apple IIe, and other must-know gaming newsDude, you're getting a Dell, with BitcoinGoogle to stop calling games that offer in-app purchases 'free'D-Wave wants more real-world deployments for its quantum computerAppcelerator gears up for the business worldBy the numbers: How Kindle Unlimited compares to other ebook subscriptionsMicrosoft password research has fatal flawNet neutrality a key battleground in growing fight over encryption, activists sayGoogle Maps update adds bicycle route elevations, voice commandsXbox One sales 'more than double' after intro of $400 Kinect-less model, still can't top the PS4Get more out of the Windows Taskbar with these 3 shortcutsHealbe finally releases lab data for its notorious GoBe calorie-tracking wristbandHome router security to be tested in upcoming hacking contestDownsizing Microsoft to spin off Nokia's MixRadio music serviceEdward Snowden: Dropbox is 'hostile to privacy'Kindle Unlimited launches: 600,000 all-you-can-read e-books for $10 per monthRomanian gang used malware to defraud international money transfer firmsEuropean Commission slams Apple for in-app purchase policiesVerizon blaming Netflix for slow streaming speeds is an 'attempt at deception' says Internet backbone providerBaidu launches search engine for BrazilAndroid Influencer: Pushbullet CEO Ryan OldenburgUK rushes through surveillance bill, extending data retention rulesComparing the Android L settings to KitKat
A company acquired by Google that develops robots for the U.S. military appears to have greatly reduced its dependence on government funding, suggesting a reluctance on Google's part to align itself too closely with military projects.
When Google acquired Boston Dynamics last December, some questioned whether the firm's military focus conflicted with Google's pledge of "don't be evil" and the virtuous image it nurtures for itself.
"Google search and destroy," quipped the U.K.'s Independent newspaper. "The internet giant (motto: 'Don't be evil') has bought a pioneer of scary robot animals. Can its ethics survive?"
To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
]]> http://www.pcworld.com/article/2456240/under-google-robot-maker-reduces-dependence-on-military-funding.html#tk.rss_all Fri, 18 Jul 2014 13:55:13 -0700 Juan Carlos Perez, IDG News Service Juan Carlos Perez, IDG News Service
Microsoft has been screaming "cloud" in many partners' deaf ears for several years, but the company found a more receptive audience at this week's Worldwide Partner Conference.
From CEO Satya Nadella on down, all Microsoft officials at the event told attendees that they need to switch their businesses to the cloud urgently, or else risk obsolescence and market defeat.
"You need to get on this train. This market is being made now," a vehement and adrenaline-drenched Kevin Turner—Microsoft's COO—said during a WPC keynote, adding that Microsoft doesn't have enough partners selling its cloud services anywhere in the world.
To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Chrome evangelist François Beaufort gave us a glimpse of the potential future of Chrome OS on Friday, and boy is it ugly.
Maybe that's a bit harsh. The lone screenshot Beaufort provided of the "Athena project" is clearly in its early days; the developer fully warns that the Chromium team is still experimenting with it. "The first draft consists in a collection of windows with some simple window management," he wrote on Google+.
Even so, it's hard to look at.
The first look at Project Athena for Chrome OS mashes up Material Design with the feel of Apple's Time Machine. (Click to enlarge.)
To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
]]> http://www.pcworld.com/article/2455151/google-reveals-athena-a-material-design-inspired-revamp-of-chrome-os.html#tk.rss_all Chromebooks Operating Systems Fri, 18 Jul 2014 13:35:13 -0700 Stephen Lawson Stephen Lawson
A breakthrough by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology could change the way Web and mobile apps are written and help companies like Facebook keep the cat videos coming.
Their main innovation is a new way to decide when each packet can scurry across a data center to its destination. The software that the MIT team developed, called Fastpass, uses parallel computing to make those decisions almost as soon as the packets arrive at each switch. They think Fastpass may show up in production data centers in about two years.
In today's networks, packets can spend a lot of their time in big, memory-intensive queues, lined up like tourists at Disney World. That's because switches mostly decide on their own when each packet can go on to its destination, and they do so with limited information. Fastpass gives that job to a central server, called an arbiter, that can look at a whole segment of the data center and schedule packets in a more efficient way, according to Hari Balakrishnan, MIT's Fujitsu Professor in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. He co-wrote a paper that will be presented at an Association for Computing Machinery conference next month. The co-authors included Facebook researcher Hans Fugal.
To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
]]> http://www.pcworld.com/article/2456180/mit-invention-to-speed-up-data-centers-should-cheer-developers.html#tk.rss_all Networking Fri, 18 Jul 2014 13:25:17 -0700 Grant Gross Grant Gross
The U.S government can take action to slow the calls in other countries to abandon U.S. tech vendors following revelations about widespread National Security Agency surveillance, some tech representatives said Friday.
Decisions by other governments to move their residents' data away from the U.S. are hurting tech vendors, but Congress can take steps to "rebuild the trust" in the U.S. as a responsible Internet leader, said Kevin Bankston, policy director of the New America Foundation's Open Technology Institute.
Still, other governments will continue to try to use the NSA revelations by former agency contractor Edward Snowden to their advantage, said panelists at a Congressional Internet Caucus discussion on the effect of NSA surveillance on U.S. businesses.
To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
]]> http://www.pcworld.com/article/2456163/us-needs-to-restore-trust-following-nsa-revelations-tech-groups-say.html#tk.rss_all Government Networking Security Privacy Fri, 18 Jul 2014 13:25:15 -0700 Marc Ferranti Marc Ferranti
With Google, IBM, SAP, Intel and other tech titans reporting earnings this week, the focus is again on mobile and cloud technology. The general trend appears to be that the further a tech vendor has moved away from its legacy desktop-oriented products, the better its earnings are.
IBM has launched ambitious cloud and mobile initiatives—but the resulting products are not quite fully baked. IBM officials themselves acknowledge as much, with IBM CEO Ginni Rometty talking about "positioning ourselves for growth over the long term" in the company's earnings release Thursday.
Earlier this year, IBM announced a global competition to encourage developers to create mobile consumer and business apps powered by its Watson supercomputer platform. Just this week, IBM and Apple said they are teaming up to create business apps for Apple's mobile phones and tablets.
To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
]]> http://www.pcworld.com/article/2456160/wall-street-beat-transition-to-mobile-cloud-hits-tech-earnings.html#tk.rss_all Business Issues Fri, 18 Jul 2014 13:20:00 -0700 Agam Shah Agam Shah Refunds for returned products will be issued in real currency
To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
My sides are so sore from laughing. The video game industry lost its collective minds this week and decided to deliver unto you the most ridiculous set of news possible. Seriously, we've got an infamous dictator suing over misuse of his image, Flappy Bird running on an Apple IIe, and Fred Durst streaming video games on Twitch in between recording vocal tracks for a new Limp Bizkit album. Surely this is the end of days—as evidenced by the reveal of a new Doom game.
Here's all the video game news for the week of July 14. I'll leave out the "fit to print" part this week.
It'll never stop
That Flappy Bird port train just keeps on chugging. Developer Dagen Brock ported the game to the Apple II this week, thereby causing a rift in the space-time continuum and unleashing the hordes of demons waiting just outside the fabric of our world.
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In case the headline didn't tip you off: Yep, you can buy Dell products with Bitcoin now, as Michael Dell himself proudly trumpeted on Twitter earlier today.
]]> http://www.pcworld.com/article/2456060/dwave-wants-more-realworld-deployments-for-its-quantum-computer.html#tk.rss_all Business Issues Fri, 18 Jul 2014 11:30:15 -0700 Joab Jackson Joab Jackson
System administrators take note: That mobile employee expense app you're building should be every bit as easy to use as Facebook. Oh, and you better deliver it quickly too, because that's how Facebook rolls.
Increasingly, organizations are finding that they need to build mobile apps for their employees in this hyper-connected world. Because employees are probably already used to Twitter, Facebook, Google Maps and other consumer-friendly apps, they'll expect a high degree of polish and performance from their enterprise apps as well.
"As consumers become more familiar with mobile experiences, they are bringing those expectations into the enterprise and expecting the enterprises to move just as fast," said Jeff Haynie, co-founder and CEO of Appcelerator, which offers a set of software and services for building, testing and managing mobile applications.
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]]> http://www.pcworld.com/article/2456040/appcelerator-gears-up-for-the-business-world.html#tk.rss_all Development Fri, 18 Jul 2014 11:00:00 -0700 James Careless James Careless We look at how Amazon's new ebook subscription service stacks up against similar offerings from Oyster and Scribd in terms of publisher deals, number of books, and the number of books you'll actually want to read. http://www.techhive.com/article/2455479/by-the-numbers-how-kindle-unlimited-compares-to-other-ebook-subscriptions.html#tk.rss_all Books software Web Apps Fri, 18 Jul 2014 11:00:00 -0700 Tony Bradley Tony Bradley
I wrote yesterday about a report from Microsoft researchers, which goes against established password security best practices. The new guidance from the Microsoft researchers makes sense to me, because it fits how I handle password management already. However, at least one security expert feels that there is a fatal flaw that makes the new password advice impractical: You.
Almost every aspect of computer security and privacy seems to come back to that one fundamental issue. You—the user—are the weakest link in the security chain. No matter how effective a security process or tool has the potential to be, user error can undermine the whole thing and render the security useless.
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]]> http://www.pcworld.com/article/2455478/microsoft-password-research-has-fatal-flaw.html#tk.rss_all Fri, 18 Jul 2014 10:50:10 -0700 Stephen Lawson Stephen Lawson
Plans to favor some Internet packets over others threaten consumers' hard-won right to use encryption, a digital privacy advocate says.
Activists and tech companies fended off efforts in the U.S. in the 1990s to ban Internet encryption or give the government ways around it, but an even bigger battle over cryptography is brewing now, according to Sascha Meinrath, director of X-Lab, a digital civil-rights think tank launched earlier this year. One of the most contested issues in that battle will be net neutrality, Meinrath said.
The new fight will be even more fierce than the last one, because Internet service providers now see dollars and cents in the details of packets traversing their networks. They want to charge content providers for priority delivery of their packets across the network, something that a controversial Federal Communications Commission proposal could allow under certain conditions. Friday is the filing deadline for the first round of public comments on that plan.
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]]> http://www.pcworld.com/article/2456000/net-neutrality-a-key-battleground-in-growing-fight-over-encryption-activists-say.html#tk.rss_all Security Encryption Privacy Government Fri, 18 Jul 2014 10:37:00 -0700 Derek Walter Derek Walter Version 8.2 includes interface tweaks and better visibility for Uber users http://www.greenbot.com/article/2455137/google-maps-update-adds-bicycle-route-elevations-voice-commands.html#tk.rss_all Apps Fri, 18 Jul 2014 10:30:00 -0700 Hayden Dingman Hayden Dingman
Editor's note: This article was originally published 7/17/14 but was updated 7/18/14 with NPD's sales numbers for the PlayStation 4.
We're still waiting on the NPD research group to release its monthly console sales estimates later today (see update at bottom --ed.), but Microsoft got so excited last night that it couldn't wait any longer, showering in confetti and those little popper things where you pull on the string and they explode—people are finally buying the Xbox One!
"Since the new Xbox One offering launched on June 9th, we've seen sales of Xbox One more than double in the US, compared to sales in May," Microsoft wrote in a blog post. The "new Xbox One offering" refers, of course, to the model where they stripped out the controversial Kinect peripheral and dropped the price from $500 to a more competitive $400.
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]]> http://www.pcworld.com/article/2455466/xbox-one-sales-more-than-double-after-intro-of-400-kinect-less-model.html#tk.rss_all Gaming Fri, 18 Jul 2014 09:42:00 -0700 Ian Paul Ian Paul
One of the best features of Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 is the ability to pin apps to the Taskbar. Until Microsoft comes out with the refreshed Start menu, pinning apps is a must for Windows 8.1 users.
As the go-to location for dealing with and switching between open programs, the Taskbar may be the most clickable location on your desktop. But there's no reason you can't spice it up with a few keyboard tricks to make things a little more efficient.
Pick by number
If you have a bunch of apps pinned to your taskbar, the keyboard offers a quick way to fire up or switch to a program without reaching for your mouse.
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]]> http://www.pcworld.com/article/2455091/get-more-out-of-the-windows-taskbar-with-these-3-shortcuts.html#tk.rss_all Windows Fri, 18 Jul 2014 09:38:00 -0700 Jon Phillips Jon Phillips According to its lab report, the wrist-worn wearable can detect the calories in the food you eat with an error rate of 13.5 percent. But this comes via a blog post, not a peer-reviewed study. http://www.techhive.com/article/2455961/healbe-finally-releases-lab-data-for-its-notorious-gobe-calorie-tracking-wristband.html#tk.rss_all Gadgets Fri, 18 Jul 2014 09:20:00 -0700 Lucian Constantin Lucian Constantin
Researchers are gearing up to hack an array of different home routers during a contest next month at the Defcon 22 security conference.
The contest is called SOHOpelessly Broken—a nod to the small office/home office space targeted by the products—and follows a growing number of large scale attacks this year against routers and other home embedded systems.
The competition is organized by security consultancy firm Independent Security Evaluators and advocacy group the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), and will have two separate challenges.
The first challenge, known as Track 0, will require researchers to demonstrate exploits for previously unknown, or zero-day, vulnerabilities in a number of popular off-the-shelf consumer wireless routers.
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]]> http://www.pcworld.com/article/2455980/home-router-security-to-be-tested-in-upcoming-hacking-contest.html#tk.rss_all Networking Security Fri, 18 Jul 2014 08:43:00 -0700 Jared Newman Jared Newman
As Microsoft looks to slim down with layoffs and restructuring, Nokia is spinning MixRadio into a separate steaming music company.
While the app will still come preloaded on Windows Phones, it will also come to Android and iOS, according to The Guardian. There's no word on when the spin-off will be finalized, or when the apps will become available on other platforms.
It's also unclear whether MixRadio will look to include ads in its app now that it's no longer an exclusive perk for Nokia phone owners. Currently, the app is ad-free, but users can get higher audio quality, offline listening and unlimited song skipping for $4 per month.
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]]> http://www.pcworld.com/article/2455962/downsizing-microsoft-to-spin-off-nokias-mixradio-music-service.html#tk.rss_all Fri, 18 Jul 2014 08:00:00 -0700 Ian Paul Ian Paul
Dropbox is a very popular cloud storage service, but NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden is no fan. In a recent interview with The Guardian, Snowden called Dropbox a "targeted, wannabe PRISM partner" that is "very hostile to privacy."
Snowden also isn't happy about Dropbox's decision in April to add former U.S. Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice to its Board of Directors. Snowden called Rice "probably the most anti-privacy official you can imagine."
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]]> http://www.pcworld.com/article/2455215/edward-snowden-dropbox-is-hostile-to-privacy.html#tk.rss_all Privacy Storage Cloud & Services Fri, 18 Jul 2014 07:23:00 -0700 Jared Newman Jared Newman Amazon's new subscription e-book plan includes more than 600,000 titles, but no major publishers. http://www.techhive.com/article/2455114/kindle-unlimited-launches-600-000-all-you-can-read-e-books-for-10-per-month.html#tk.rss_all Books software Fri, 18 Jul 2014 07:05:11 -0700 Lucian Constantin Lucian Constantin
Romanian and French authorities have dismantled a cybercriminal network that infected computers at money transfer outlets across Europe and used them to perform illegal transactions.
The gang was also involved in the theft of credit card details through skimming, credit card cloning, money laundering and drug trafficking, Europol announced Thursday.
The gang, which was composed mostly of Romanian citizens, infected computers at copy shops that also operated as money transfer franchises in Austria, Belgium, Germany, Norway, the U.K. and other European countries. No details were released about how the computers were infected, but Europol said that the attackers used a remote access Trojan (RAT) program.
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]]> http://www.pcworld.com/article/2455940/romanian-gang-used-malware-to-defraud-international-money-transfer-firms.html#tk.rss_all Security Legal Fri, 18 Jul 2014 07:00:00 -0700 Loek Essers Loek Essers Apple maintained that its parental controls 'go far beyond the features of others in the industry.' http://www.macworld.com/article/2455880/european-commission-slams-apple-for-in-app-purchase-policies.html#tk.rss_all Government Fri, 18 Jul 2014 06:42:00 -0700 Ian Paul Ian Paul
The Internet just got its back(bone) up over Verizon's recent finger pointing that blamed Netflix for poor streaming speeds on the ISP's network. Level 3, one of Netflix's Internet traffic carriers as well as one of the major 'Tier 1' networks that help serve as the backbone of the Internet, said Verizon's reasoning is nonsense and an "attempt at deception" that backfired.
In fact, Verizon is deliberately constraining capacity from network providers like Level 3, Mark Taylor, Level 3's vice president of content and media, said in a recent blog post.
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]]> http://www.pcworld.com/article/2455212/verizon-blaming-netflix-for-slow-streaming-speeds-is-an-attempt-at-deception-says-internet-backbone.html#tk.rss_all Fri, 18 Jul 2014 06:40:11 -0700 Michael Kan Michael Kan
China's Baidu is stepping into another major market with a search engine geared for Brazil, and is preparing to set up a research and development center in the country.
The search engine formally launched on Friday. With a Portuguese language interface, it offers Web, image and video search, along with a link to Baidu's "Postbar" product, an online forum.
The Brazil site marks Baidu's first international move in search since its Japan search engine launched in 2007.
The company has long led in its home market as China's largest search provider, with a 60 percent share, according to Internet analytics site CNZZ.com. But Baidu has yet to achieve that kind of success in Japan, where Yahoo and Google reign.
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]]> http://www.pcworld.com/article/2455900/baidu-launches-search-engine-for-brazil.html#tk.rss_all Productivity Fri, 18 Jul 2014 05:30:00 -0700 Florence Ion Florence Ion The man behind one of Android's most popular apps talks development, why he got into the Android app game, and what he loves about developing for Google's mobile platform. http://www.greenbot.com/article/2454941/android-influencer-pushbullet-ceo-ryan-oldenburg.html#tk.rss_all Apps Fri, 18 Jul 2014 05:10:11 -0700 Loek Essers Loek Essers
The U.K. government has pushed through a new surveillance law to replace one a European Union court said interfered with fundamental privacy rights—but, say civil rights campaigners, the new law is worse than the one it replaces.
The Data Retention and Investigatory Powers Act 2014, also known as DRIP, was fast-tracked by the U.K. government after European Union laws requiring communications providers to retain metadata were ruled invalid by the Court of Justice of the EU (CJEU) in April because they seriously interfered with fundamental privacy rights.
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]]> http://www.pcworld.com/article/2455860/uk-rushes-through-surveillance-bill-extending-data-retention-rules.html#tk.rss_all Legal Government Fri, 18 Jul 2014 04:00:00 -0700 Blake Stimac Blake Stimac The settings menus in Android L get a fresh look and a few tweaks, but aren't as different as you would expect. http://www.greenbot.com/article/2455160/comparing-the-android-l-settings-to-kitkat.html#tk.rss_all Android
If you're an impulse buyer trying to reform your ways, Facebook and Twitter are not on your side.
Both companies said Thursday they were working on new services to let their users either make purchases directly from their feeds or gain instant access to deals and promotions that can be redeemed in stores. It's the latest display of competition heating up between the companies as they seek to add digital storefront real estate to their sites.
Why waste clicks getting to Amazon or eBay when you can have all your fun in between retweets or "likes"? Naturally, you might also retweet the advertiser's promotion, which would make Twitter happy.
With Twitter, the technology comes courtesy of CardSpring, which Twitter said it had acquired.
CardSpring lets software developers create offers inside their apps that users can add to their debit or credit cards. When the person makes a purchase in the store, the offer or discount is automatically applied.
The idea is that on Twitter, similar types of offers from businesses might appear in the stream. Twitter users could access the offers by providing their payment information to Twitter or some other processor. "We're confident the CardSpring team and the technology they've built are a great fit with our philosophy regarding the best ways to bring in-the-moment commerce experiences to our users," Twitter said in its announcement.
Twitter has already integrated some e-commerce functions to its site, such as by letting people add items to their Amazon carts by replying "#AmazonCart" to certain tweets. Twitter also has partnered with American Express to let card holders buy items by tweeting in a certain way. Those only work for users who synchronize their Twitter accounts with their Amazon or American Express accounts.
CardSpring's technology could make for a more streamlined buying experience, maybe even one with a dedicated "buy" button. Previous reports have indicated Twitter might be looking in that direction.
Twitter did not say Thursday that such a button was coming. "We'll have more information on our commerce direction in the future," the company said.
A "buy" button for Facebook is definitely on the horizon. The company is now testing a service to let users buy retail items directly from their news feeds or from a business' page. There are only a few small and medium-sized businesses participating now. Facebook identified only one: Modify Watches, which makes interchangeable watches that the company says are "dope."
Naturally, these e-commerce services could help Facebook and Twitter's bottom lines by attracting vendors that want to connect with potential customers.
One barrier to their success could be people's willingness to share their payment information with Facebook or Twitter. Facebook, in its announcement, said it built its feature with privacy in mind and that no payment information would be shared with other advertisers. People can also select whether they want to save their payment information for future purchases, Facebook said.
