Wall Street Beat: Tech shares up as Internet stocks rise

Tech stocks had an upbeat week as industry watchers appear to be looking at the positive side of earnings from Internet, consumer electronics and networking companies.

IT industry bellwethers have reported mixed results for the quarter ending in June. This week, earnings season continued with reports from LinkedIn, Yelp and Sony, among other companies.

Tech shares led markets to close up Friday, even though several indexes were down earlier in the day after a tepid report on the U.S. jobs market. The Labor Department said that although the unemployment rate fell last month to 7.4 percent, its lowest since 2008, the country added just 162,000 jobs in July, below the average monthly 202,000 this year.

The tech-heavy Nasdaq gained 0.36 percent to close up by 3.34 points at 15,658.36. The Nasdaq Computer Index rose 0.56 percent to 1735.89.

This week, professional social network LinkedIn was the tech star, announcing second quarter revenue of US$363.7 million, an increase of 59 percent year over year, while net income rose from $2.8 million to $3.7 million. LinkedIn membership grew to 238 million, rising 37 percent year-over-year.

LinkedIn shares spiked Friday afternoon by $22.58 to close at $235.58.

"Decisions made two years ago to re-write LinkedIn's code base have enabled rapid product innovation, which is driving much higher member engagement, creating a foundation that helped fuel tremendous self-service ad sales," said Canaccord Genuity analyst Michael Graham in a research note.

Online user business reviews site Yelp also came out with strong results, reporting that net revenue jumped 69 percent year over year to $55 million. The company's loss shrank to $878,000 from $2 million. The average number of unique visitors per month rose 38 percent year over year to approximately 108 million, while active local business accounts increased 62 percent year over year to approximately 51,400.

Yelp shares jumped Friday by $5.52 to close at $57.02.

Though LinkedIn and Yelp revenues are minuscule compared to Facebook's, their rising user statistics appeared to fuel the general good feeling toward Internet stocks. Last week, Facebook said mobile ad sales stoked revenue, which jumped 53 percent year over year to $1.81 billion, while profit totaled $333 million compared to a net loss a year earlier.

Facebook this week finally succeeded in clawing its way back to its May 2012 initial public offering price of $38, on Friday closing at $38.05.

Consumer electronics giant Sony, meanwhile, reported a profit, pushing forward with a turnaround that was sparked previously by a sale of assets including its U.S. headquarters and a Tokyo office complex. This quarter, improved results came from a combination of solid smartphone sales and a favorable foreign exchange rate.

The company reported that net profit was ¥3.5 billion (US$35 million) in the quarter, compared to losses of ¥24.6 billion in the same quarter last year, while revenue increased 13 percent to ¥1.7 trillion.

Sony's mobile products and communications business reported revenue of ¥389 billion, a 36 percent increase year over year, underscoring the importance of mobile communications to the future of just about any company in the consumer electronics business.

"Semiconductors for smartphones will see healthy revenue growth as demand for increased speeds and additional features continue to drive high-end smartphone demand in developed countries and low-cost smartphones in developing countries," said Nina Turner, research manager for semiconductors at IDC in a report this week. PC chip sales will remain weak, but as smartphone sales surge, semiconductor revenue worldwide will increase this year by 6.9 percent, reaching $320 billion, IDC said in the report.

Meanwhile, the wireless infrastructure segment of Alcatel-Lucent's business remained stable in the second quarter as the company continues efforts to focus on IP networking and ultra-broadband equipment. Revenue rose 1.9 percent to €3.61 million, driven by strong growth in sales of IP networking equipment, the company said. However, the company reported a net loss of €885 million (US$1.15 billion) for the quarter, weighed down by a charge of €552 million following a re-evaluation of assets, and restructuring charges of €194 million.

A strong week for tech stocks bodes well for confidence in the tech sector, as investors seem to be accentuating the positive aspects of what has been by most accounts a mixed quarter. But potential pitfalls remain.

Continued global macroeconomic uncertainty from a slowdown in China, the eurozone debt crisis and recession, Japan recession and the U.S. government spending cutbacks as a result of political compromise could all be factors weighing down IT, particularly spending that affects sales of components, IDC said in its report.

16.01 | 0 komentar | Read More

Why Small Businesses Need to Spring for Business-Class Internet Access

Google is being accused of violating the FCCs Open Internet Order as a result of its policy toward servers. Essentially, if you run a server from a Google Fiber Internet connection, you're technically violating the terms of service, and you could find your Internet access shut down. Google stands by that policy, but the reality is that this is only one of many reasons that small businesses should not run a server from a consumer-grade Internet connection.

The issue with Google Fiber stems from a clause in the terms of service that reads, "Unless you have a written agreement with Google Fiber permitting you to do so, you should not host any type of server using your Google Fiber connection."

Google has been a proponent of net neutrality, but some were quick to note that Google seems to have changed teams now that it's also in the Internet provider business. Google's response to the FCC includes this explanation: "The server policy has been established to account for the congestion management and network security needs of Google Fiber's network architecture, particularly given that Google Fiber does not impose data caps on its users."

Bottom line: Google believes it has a right to ban someone from hosting a server on it's Google Fiber network because of the potential impact it could have on the bandwidth for all of the rest of the customers. That seems reasonable.

You don't really want to host your business server on a consumer Internet service anyway. Granted, Google Fiber delivers a 1Gbps connection for a very low cost compared to any other consumer or business service. However, Google Fiber is only available in a few select cities, and there are other reasons to choose a business-class Internet provider.

First, Google states explicitly that it doesn't impose a bandwidth cap, but many consumer Internet services do. Comcast used to have a 250GB per month cap, but switched to a tiered-pricing plan last year for heavy users. The cap is now 300GB, after which Comcast charges $10 extra per month for each additional 50GB.

Another benefit of business-class Internet service is that you generally have a dedicated, static IP address, which makes it much easier to host and manage a server. Consumer Internet services use DHCP to randomly assign IP addresses, so your website or FTP server might be on one address today, and a different one tomorrow.

Most consumer Internet services block various TCP ports—for example port 25. It's blocked as a measure to guard against or limit spam, based on the assumption that no consumer customer is hosting an email server (because it would violate the TOS). You want to have full access to all of the ports for your Internet access—including TCP port 25, so business-class Internet is the way to go.

Tech support is also different. Calling the consumer tech support line when you're having an issue is typically an exercise in futility and frustration. If your business depends on the Internet connection, it can be that much more stressful. The technical support for a business-class account is generally more knowledgeable and more expedient, so you can minimize down time and keep your business online.

The operative word in the term "small and medium business" is "business". In other words, regardless of whether your company has one employee, one hundred, or one thousand, it's still a business, and it still needs to act like one. That is particularly true when it comes to choosing an Internet provider.

16.00 | 0 komentar | Read More

Rapidly growing DigitalOcean opens second NYC data center

Continuing its rapid expansion, cloud service provider DigitalOcean has opened a second facility in the greater New York metropolitan area -- a data center located in Google's gargantuan Manhattan facility.

The additional location is another sign of the fast-growing success the company has had in offering a low-cost, easy-to-use IaaS (infrastructure as a service).

"There's a huge market for developers out there who just want a server online as fast as possible, and that is what DigitalOcean provides," said Mitch Wainer, a co-founder and the chief marketing officer of DigitalOcean.

Although Wainer disputed that DigitalOcean's first New York City-area data facility, actually located in northern New Jersey, ran out of space, new users who have signed up in the past month or so were instructed that they could not host their accounts there, and were instructed to choose DigitalOcean's outlets in Amsterdam or San Francisco.

In any case, the company's user base is growing quickly. The company has accrued more than 35,000 customers since its launch in 2011, and its revenue is increasing by about 30 percent to 50 percent per month, Wainer said.

Internet service market analysis firm Netcraft noted that in June 2013 DigitalOcean had more than 7,000 Web-facing servers, a dramatic increase from the prior December when Netcraft counted only 100 DigitalOcean Web-facing servers.

This newest set of servers is being colocated with the Telx data center company, which leases space in Google's 3 million-square-foot building. The building takes up an entire block on 8th Avenue, in the Chelsea district of Manhattan.

DigitalOcean was founded with the idea of offering cloud hosting that would be easier to set up than what was offered by the market leader, Amazon Web Services (AWS).

"There was a huge void in the market," Wainer said. Amazon and Rackspace are focused on enterprise-scaled businesses, but businesses in the lower-tier to midlevel market, which don't require advanced feature sets and don't have full engineering teams to manage infrastructure, are completely ignored, he said.

With its wide range of services, Amazon Web Services recently launched a series of tutorials that can guide users into setting up virtual machines.

In contrast, DigitalOcean keeps its deployment options relatively simple -- and inexpensive. Accounts are billed either on a monthly or an hourly basis. The least expensive "droplet," which is what DigitalOcean calls a virtual machine, costs US$5 a month, or about $0.007 cents per minute, and features a single CPU core between 2GHz and 3GHz, 512MB of working memory, 20GB of storage and 1 terabyte of data transfers.

In contrast, the least expensive month-to-month option on AWS, a T1.micro image running Linux, would run about $14.96 per month, and does not come with any storage.

The company claims that users can set up a droplet, or resize it to another pricing tier, in less than a minute. It offers virtual machine images running basic versions of either the Ubuntu, Debian, CentOS, Arch or Fedora Linux distributions.

The company is using a number of new technologies for competitive performance, including SSDs (solid state drives), which can boost I/O performance. For virtualization, DigitalOcean uses Red Hat's KVM hypervisor.

Just as Microsoft is doing with its Windows Azure service, DigitalOcean is initially pursuing the market of developers who need modestly priced machines to develop and test code.

Wainer points to the rapidly growing user base of GitHub, an online source-code repository, as proof of the potential size of the developer market. Founded in 2008, GitHub now hosts 7.7 million repositories from 3.3 million users.

"You can see from that market size alone, that this is a billion-dollar market opportunity," Wainer said.

While DigitalOcean has been courting the developer market, it is also suited for startup businesses as well, Wainer said. For instance, one startup using DigitalOcean is the RSS reader service NewsBlur, which has accrued a significant user base after Google shut down its own RSS reader.

Not that the company hasn't had a few bumps. Last month, one user found that the service was using identical SSH fingerprints for multiple Ubuntu droplets generated within a single account, which was a significant security vulnerability. The company has since fixed the problem.

"That's one of the things about being a startup -- you can't be perfect from the get-go," Wainer said, though adding, "Whenever there is an issue, we've been responsive."

DigitalOcean, which is based in New York City, now has 30 employees, though it is looking to hire network engineers and Linux system administrators. It is also expecting to get a significant investment from an outside party shortly, which will be used "to drive new features and acquire capacity in additional regions," Wainer said.

The company is planning to offer virtual private networking and object storage, similar to Amazon's Simple Storage Service (S3). It will also broaden its array of off-the-shelf virtual machines, including those with WordPress or other popular applications installed and ready for use.

Joab Jackson covers enterprise software and general technology breaking news for The IDG News Service. Follow Joab on Twitter at @Joab_Jackson. Joab's e-mail address is Joab_Jackson@idg.com

16.00 | 0 komentar | Read More

Data center innovator Ken Brill dies at 68

Ken Brill, founder of the Uptime Institute and a forward thinker in data center design and operations, died this week at the age of 68, the Institute said on Thursday. The cause was cancer, a spokesman said.

Brill was known for his work creating the Uptime Institute's data center tiering system, which provides a way to rate and compare the reliability of computing facilities. It's used by many large companies for their data center planning and selection.

He was also a big proponent of data center energy efficiency, which has become a vital concern as computing services become more powerful and widespread. In particular, Brill pushed for better communication between IT staff and the engineering teams that run data centers, which he believed was the only way to get the most from operations.

"I think that will be a big part of his legacy: bringing together different disciplines to speak a common language for the betterment of the enterprise and its use of IT resources," said Julian Kudritzki, the Uptime Institute's chief operating officer, who worked with Brill for almost a decade.

Brill is also credited with technical innovations, including the introduction of dual power supplies for servers, which ensures a server keeps running if one power supply fails. He was awarded a patent for the invention in 2000 but never sought to profit from it, according to Kudritzki.

"He was motivated by the desire for constant improvement," he said. "That's what drove him."

That passion could make him combative at times, and Brill wasn't known for pulling his punches at the data center conferences where he spoke. In its statement, the Uptime Institute called him "a brilliant and bristly individual."

"He could be cantankerous, that wasn't a secret," Kudritzki said. "If you've ever been on a panel with Ken, you'll know it's rather a sporting adventure. It was all in pursuit of his principles; he believed the industry could do better."

Brill began his data center career as a manufacturer of power supply equipment in the 1970s. "By the mid-eighties I had made and lost a million dollars and nearly went bankrupt," he said in accepting an award from DataCenter Dynamics in 2009, according to a transcript.

"While I was licking my wounds and deciding what to do next, I realized my career needed to have a higher purpose beyond me and just making money. I settled on ensuring uninterruptible uptime."

Brill also founded the Uninterruptible Uptime Users Group, now known as 7X24 Exchange International, which gave him a lifetime achievement award. In 2009, Network World named him in a list of "10 people you should know in tech."

He earned an undergraduate degree in electrical engineering from the University of Redlands in California, and an MBA from Harvard Business School.

Kudritzki said he visited Brill at his home in Maine last week, and although he was ill, they still discussed improvements that the data center industry needs to make. "Part of the pleasure of seeing him, even in that state, is that the light was still shining," he said.

Brill stopped managing the Uptime Institute in 2009, when it was bought by research firm The 451 Group. Since then, he had been focused on expanding the Institute's operations in Asia and setting its general vision.

"Of course it's a great loss; in many people's minds there's an equals sign between Ken Brill and the Uptime Institute, and vice-versa, but we'll continue to drive on," Kudritzki said.

James Niccolai covers data centers and general technology news for IDG News Service. Follow James on Twitter at @jniccolai. James's e-mail address is james_niccolai@idg.com

16.01 | 0 komentar | Read More

Researchers demo exploits that bypass Windows 8 Secure Boot

The Windows 8 Secure Boot mechanism can be bypassed on PCs from certain manufacturers because of oversights in how those vendors implemented the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) specification, according to a team of security researchers.

The researchers Andrew Furtak, Oleksandr Bazhaniuk and Yuriy Bulygin demonstrated Wednesday at the Black Hat USA security conference in Las Vegas two attacks that bypassed Secure Boot in order to install a UEFI bootkit -- boot rootkit -- on affected computers.

Secure Boot is a feature of the UEFI specification that only allows software components with trusted digital signatures to be loaded during the boot sequence. It was designed specifically to prevent malware like bootkits from compromising the boot process.

According to the researchers, the exploits demonstrated at Black Hat are possible not because of vulnerabilities in Secure Boot itself, but because of UEFI implementation errors made by platform vendors.

The first exploit works because certain vendors do not properly protect their firmware, allowing an attacker to modify the code responsible for enforcing Secure Boot, said Bulygin who works at McAfee.

The exploit is designed to modify the platform key -- the root key at the core of all Secure Boot signature checks -- but in order to work it needs to be executed in kernel mode, the most privileged part of the operating system.

This somewhat limits the attack because a remote attacker would first have to find a way to execute code in kernel mode on the targeted computer.

The researchers demonstrated their kernel-mode exploit on an Asus VivoBook Q200E laptop, but some Asus desktop motherboards are also affected according to Bulygin.

Asus released BIOS updates for some motherboards, but not for the VivoBook laptop, the researcher said. He believes that more VivoBook models might be vulnerable.

Asus did not respond to a request for comment sent Thursday.

The second exploit demonstrated by the researchers can run in user mode, which means that an attacker would only need to gain code execution rights on the system by exploiting a vulnerability in a regular application like Java, Adobe Flash, Microsoft Office or others.

The researchers declined to reveal any technical details about the second exploit or to name the vendors whose products are affected by it because the targeted vulnerability was discovered recently.

The issue that makes the kernel-mode exploit possible was discovered and reported to the affected platform vendors over a year ago, Bulygin said. At some point, after enough time has passed, the public needs to know about it, he said.

Several other issues that can be used to bypass Secure Boot have also been identified and their disclosure is being coordinated with Microsoft and the UEFI Forum, the industry standard body that manages the UEFI specification, Bulygin said.

"Microsoft is working with partners to help ensure that secure boot delivers a great security experience for our customers," Microsoft said Thursday in an emailed statement.

Despite these vendor implementation problems, Secure Boot is still a huge step forward, Bulygin said. To install bootkits now, attackers first need to find a vulnerability that would allow them to bypass Secure Boot, while on legacy platforms there was nothing to stop them, he said.

16.01 | 0 komentar | Read More

Qualcomm calls out eight-core processors as 'dumb'

Eight-core processors are "dumb," as the consumer wants an experience that comes from more than just throwing cores together, a Qualcomm executive said, referring to new eight-core chips announced recently.

"You can't take eight lawnmower engines, put them together and now claim you have an eight-cylinder Ferrari. It just doesn't make sense," the company's senior vice president Anand Chandrasekher said, according to a transcript of his comments to Taiwan media provided on Friday.

Qualcomm focuses on giving consumers a good experience, which requires first good modems, next long battery life, and then an affordable price point, he added. Simply throwing cores together is the equivalent of throwing spaghetti against the wall, and seeing what sticks, he added.

The comments follow a launch by rival MediaTek of its new octa-core chip that it claims will offer better performance over competing processors.

Asked whether Qualcomm would one day launch its own octa-core processor, Chandrasekher said, "We don't do dumb things."

"When you can't engineer a product that meets the consumers' expectations, maybe that's when you resort to simply throwing cores together," he said, adding "That's a dumb way to do it, and I think our engineers aren't dumb."

MediaTek declined to comment. The company's octa-core processor will arrive in this year's fourth quarter. It differs from other octa-core processors in that it can use all eight cores simultaneously, according to MediaTek. The company claims this will help reduce the chip's power consumption, while improving its stability in processing applications.

In the past, Qualcomm has been vocal in defending its products from rival chips boasting more cores.

Both MediaTek and Qualcomm are competing to grab a bigger share of the chip market for smartphones and tablets by releasing new chips for both high and lower-end devices. Qualcomm has been riding on the success of its Snapdragon chips, which can be found in the HTC One, Samsung Galaxy S4, and the new Nexus 7 tablet from Google and Asus.

MediaTek chips are being used by vendors including Acer, Lenovo, and local Chinese smartphone vendor Xiaomi.

Samsung has also come out with an octa-core processor. Last month, it unveiled an updated eight-core chip with a higher clock speed and better GPU.

16.01 | 0 komentar | Read More

Groups oppose proposed change to Internet content 'safe harbor'

A proposed change to U.S. law that would allow state attorneys general to hold websites liable for content posted by users is a "dangerous path," a group of tech trade groups and legal scholars said Wednesday.

A proposal by a group of state attorneys general to modify the so-called safe harbor provision in section 230 of the Communications Decency Act "would jeopardize the continued growth of the entire Internet industry and the free expression rights of Internet users everywhere," the groups said in a letter to top U.S. lawmakers.

Section 230 of the law broadly protects Internet publishers and service providers from responsibility for user-generated content on their sites. But in June, a group of state attorneys general proposed a change to the law that would allow prosecution of publishers in cases where user-posted content violates state law.

Federal prosecutors now can hold web publishers liable in cases involving federal criminal law, intellectual property law, and electronic communications privacy law, and the state attorneys general want the same authority.

But those signing Wednesday's letter—including the Center for Democracy and Technology, NetChoice, Public Knowledge and the Internet Association—said the proposed change is a bad idea. Twenty-three trade groups and other organizations signed the letter, along with 19 legal scholars.

The attorneys general proposal "would replace the certainty that Section 230 provides with open-ended legal risk," the letter said. "By hosting third-party content, online service providers would expose themselves to potential prosecution under literally thousands of criminal statutes on a state-by-state basis. Keeping up with the thicket of state criminal laws would be a significant burden, especially for start-ups and smaller companies, and the risk of liability would create a strong incentive for companies to minimize or avoid interactive features and user-generated content."

Supporters of the proposal have argued that section 230 discourages websites from policing their content, including, at some sites, ads for underage prostitution. Large Internet companies no longer need the protections, supporters have argued.

Attorney General Marty Jackley of South Dakota argued in June that in section 230, "you've essentially given these guys immunity" when state criminal laws are broken.

16.01 | 0 komentar | Read More

IBM says SEC will investigate how it reports cloud revenues

IBM is the subject of a probe by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission into how it reports revenue related to its cloud-computing business, the vendor revealed Wednesday.

"In May 2013, IBM learned that the SEC is conducting an investigation into how IBM reports cloud revenue," the company said in a filing with the SEC. "IBM is cooperating with the SEC in this matter."

"IBM's reporting of cloud revenue is the result of a rigorous and disciplined process," IBM spokesman Ed Barbini said via email on Wednesday. "We are confident that the information we have provided has been consistently accurate."

Further details of the investigation weren't available.

Cloud sales were up 70 percent in the first half of this year, IBM said earlier this month. The company doesn't provide separate quarterly figures for cloud revenue, but has said it expects the total to stand at $7 billion by 2015.

IBM has focused on infrastructure and consulting with its cloud-computing strategy, but also offers an array of cloud-based business applications. It has invested significantly in cloud-computing acquisitions as well, such as the recent purchase of public cloud infrastructure company Softlayer.

Cloud services are typically paid for on a monthly subscription basis. While customers often ink multiyear deals, vendors can't recognize the revenue in the same way they would for a large up-front sale of hardware or perpetual software licenses.

Some vendors have begun reporting figures they say speak to the true strength of their cloud businesses. For example, SAP releases figures for its "backlog" of cloud subscription and support revenue, referring to payments that are under contract, but haven't been invoiced yet.

16.00 | 0 komentar | Read More

Seamlessly sync your data across devices

Work isn't anchored to one device or one location. In a typical day, you can go from working on a multimonitor desktop rig in the office to a laptop at a client site to a desktop at home, working in sips on a tablet or smartphone in between.

This unfettered mobility means its more critical than ever that you're able to access important files across devices, platforms and apps. Follow these tips for keeping all your data in sync, so you can keep doing business wherever your business takes you.

Bookmarks and browser settings

One of the more frustrating experiences of switching between multiple devices is the interruption to your Web browsing experience. Fortunately, popular browsers such as Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox offer built-in support for automatically syncing bookmarks, history, open tabs and even passwords.

When you sign in to Chrome, your browser settings are saved to your Google account to be used by the Chrome browser on any other computer or device. To choose what settings get synced, sign in to Chrome—you will be prompted for your verification code if you have 2-factor authentication enabled—and follow the prompts to to either "sync everything" or select individual items.

Signing in to Chrome allows you to save your browser settings to your Google account.

Syncing Firefox settings requires a bit more work. Because all data is encrypted prior to being uploaded to Mozilla's servers, a pairing process is required to synchronize the encryption key with each device you want to sync.

In the Firefox menu bar on your main computer, click Tools and select Set Up Sync. The first time you do this, you'll need to create an account with the Firefox sync server. Once you complete this setup, go to the Sync tab of the Options dialog box. Click on "pair a device," which will brings up a dialog box with three empty text fields. Do the same on your other device, but select "I have an account" when prompted instead. This will display an "easy setup" key that you need to put into the empty text boxes to get the second device verified and linked up. The process is the same for Firefox for Android. You can read more about the process on the Firefox support page.

Firefox requires you to pair each of your devices to a Firefox Sync account using an "easy setup" key.

Documents and files

Not so long ago, it was necessary to shuttle documents between computers on thumb drives or other external storage. Fortunately, we now have cloud services such as Dropbox, SugarSync, Mozy and Box to store our files for easy access from any Web-connected device.

A frequent mistake when using cloud storage is neglecting to save newly created files in synchronized folders. Depending on your cloud service, it may be possible to synchronize the entire desktop or default document folders to prevent this. An alternative is to discipline yourself to create all new documents in a synchronized "catchall" folder – you can always file them into a more appropriate subfolder at a later stage.

Email, contacts and calendar

Chances are your email is either already accessible from multiple devices through the default system on your platform or from a Web interface. But if your email system uses only POP (Post Office Protocol), in which emails are downloaded and erased from the server, it's time to switch to a modern cloud-enabled system or one with IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol).

These two options work similarly in that they allow you to see the same messages and folders from multiple devices. IMAP does not keep contacts or calendars synchronized. Cloud-based systems such as Exchange Online in Office 365 offers Contacts and Calendar sync via the Exchange Active Sync (EAS) standard; Google Mail and Yahoo Mail do so with their support of the open CalDAV and CardDAV specifications respectively.

Instant messaging

Most Instant Messaging (IM) services have clients available for all the major platforms. Things get trickier, though, if you juggle between two or more IM applications. There are a number of third-party chat clients that offer support for multiple IM services, with Digsby, Trillian and Pidgin being some popular options. Trillian offers a "continuous chat" feature that syncs conversations across all your devices. This makes it possible to switch from a desktop to a smartphone without missing a word.

Trillian syncs chats across all your devices so you can pick up conversations right where you left off.

Notes

Finally, you'll want to make sure that your notes, ideas and other scraps of digital info are properly synchronized. There are several solutions available, ranging from text-only solutions such as SimpleNote to more comprehensive options such as Evernote and Microsoft's OneNote. Not all platforms are supported by each of these—SimpleNote, for example, is not available on the BlackBerry 10—so do your research before you commit to a service.

16.00 | 0 komentar | Read More

Bogus Chrome, Firefox extensions pilfer social media accounts

Trend Micro has found two malicious browser extensions that hijack Twitter, Facebook and Google+ accounts.

The attackers plant links on social media sites that, if clicked, implore users to install a video player update. It is a common method hackers use to bait people into downloading malicious software.

The bogus video player update lures people in a macabre manner: it says it leads to a video of a young woman committing suicide, according to Trend's description.

The video player update carries a cryptographic signature that is used to verify that an application came from a certain developer and has not been modified, wrote Don Ladores, a threat response engineer, with Trend.

"It is not yet clear if this signature was fraudulently issued, or a valid organization had their signing key compromised and used for this type of purpose," he wrote.

Hackers often try to steal legitimate digital certificates from other developers in an attempt to make their malware look less suspicious.

If the video update is executed, the malware then installs a bogus Firefox or Chrome extension depending on which browser the victim uses.

The malicious plugins try to appear legitimate, bearing the names Chrome Service Pack 5.0.0 and the Mozilla Service Pack 5.0. Ladores wrote that Google now blocks the extension that uses its name. Another variation of the extension claims it is the F-Secure Security Pack 6.1.0, a fake product from the Finnish security vendor.

The plugins connect to another website and download a configuration file, which allow them to steal the login credentials from a victim's social networking accounts such as Facebook, Google+, and Twitter. The attackers can then perform a variety of actions, such as like pages, share posts, update statuses and post comments, Ladores wrote.

Send news tips and comments to jeremy_kirk@idg.com. Follow me on Twitter: @jeremy_kirk

16.01 | 0 komentar | Read More