Der Sissacher Webdienstleister CS2 hat mit Dani Kalt einen neuen CEO an der Firmenspitze. Kalt ersetzt einer Aussendung zufolge Alain Veuve, der das Unternehmen Ende Mai bereits verlassen hat. Über den Grund des Abgangs von Veuve wurden keine Angaben gemacht.
Smartphones verknüpfen geografische Informationen mit anderen Daten. Im Wettbewerb der Branche gewinnen Kartendienste an Bedeutung. Jetzt kündigt Google neue Funktionen an - in der nächsten Woche wird auch ein Einstieg von Apple erwartet. Und fünf Tage vor dem Start einer Apple-Konferenz in San Francisco hat Google Verbesserungen bei seinen Internetkartendiensten angekündigt.
Eklat um den Datenschutz im Internet: Die deutsche Bundesregierung hat die Auskunftei Schufa vor der Ausforschung sozialer Netzwerke wie Facebook gewarnt. Facebook-Freunde dürften nicht entscheiden, ob man einen Handy-Vertrag bekomme oder nicht, erklärte Justizministerin Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger am Donnerstag.
Panasonic zeigt dem von einem Bilanzskandal erschütterten Kamera- und Medizingerätehersteller Olympus die kalte Schulter. Der japanische Elektronikkonzern wolle nicht bei Olympus einsteigen, sagte Panasonic-Präsident Fumio Ohtsubo am Donnerstag. Er dementierte damit einen Bericht der Nachrichtenagentur Kyodo.
Patentkrieg und kein Ende: Kurz vor der geplanten US-Markteinführung des Galaxy SIII beantragte Apple eine einstweilige Verfügung gegen das Samsung-Gerät in Kalifornien. Apple will das S3 in ein anderes Verfahren anfügen, in dem es um das Vorgängermodell Galaxy Nexus geht. Samsung wehrt sich dagegen.
Mit Christian Vetterli hat T-Systems Schweiz einen neuen Director Service unter Vertrag genommen. In dieser Funktion nimmt der Schweizer auch Einsitz in die siebenköpfige Geschäftsleitung, teilt T-Systems via Aussendung mit. Vetterli folgt auf Jürgen Kappenberger, der seit 2008 bei T-Systems in der Schweiz tätig war und nun innerhalb des Konzerns eine neue Herausforderung auf internationaler Ebene übernimmt.
BSI Business Systems Integration mit Hauptsitz in Baden hat das Frühjahrs-Release 4.2 von BSI CTMS auf den Markt gebracht. Die Projektmanagement- und Controlling-Software für multinationale klinische Studien bei pharmazeutischen Unternehmen und Clinical Research Organizations (CROs) wurde in drei zentralen Punkten erneuert.
Nach den technischen Problemen beim Börsengang des sozialen Internetnetzwerks Facebook hat die US-Technologiebörse Nasdaq eine Entschädigung von Investoren angekündigt. Die Betreiberfirma Nasdaq OMX Group erklärt, einen Entschädigungsfonds in Höhe von 40 Millionen Dollar (32,0 Mio. Euro) aufzulegen. Die Nasdaq habe einen entsprechenden Plan der US-Börsenaufsicht SEC zur Prüfung vorgelegt.
Schlechte Nachricht für Linkedin-Nutzer: Auf einer russischen Internetseite sollen mehr als sechs Millionen Passwörter von Nutzern des Business-Netzwerks aufgetaucht sein. Die Kennwörter sind zwar verschlüsselt - doch Hacker arbeiten gerade daran, sie zu entziffern.
Im Rahmen der kürzlich abgehaltenen HP Discover 2012 hat der weltgrösste IT-Hersteller Hewlett-Packard (HP) Erweiterungen seines HP-Converged-Cloud-Portfolios angekündigt. Neue Funktionen sollen dabei die Einbindung von HP Cloudsystem in heterogene und hybride IT-Umgebungen erleichtern. Integriert in Cloudsystem sind jetzt unter anderem auch so genannte Cloudplanning Services. Sie sollen Kunden bei der Bedarfsplanung unterstützen.
ananyo writes "Researchers have been shocked to find a record-breaking phytoplankton bloom hidden under Arctic ice. The finding is a big surprise — few scientists thought blooms of this size could grow in Arctic waters. The finding implies that the Arctic is much more productive than previously thought — researchers now think some 25% of the Arctic Ocean has conditions conducive to such blooms (abstract). The discovery also helps to explain why Arctic waters have proven such a good carbon dioxide sink."
ideonexus writes "Years ago Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight.com, a blog seeking to educate the public about elections forecasting, established his model as one of the most accurate in existence, rising from a fairly unknown statistician working in baseball to one of the most respected names in election forecasting. In this article he describes all the factors that go into his predictions. A fascinating overview of the process of modeling a chaotic system."
First time accepted submitter mikewilsonuk writes "I have a 10-year-old grandson who has shown an interest in chemistry. He is home educated and doesn't read as well as schooled kids of his age. He hasn't had much science education and no chemistry at all. None of his parents or grandparents have chemistry education beyond the school minimum and none feel confident about teaching it. My own memories of chemistry teaching in school are of disappointment, a shocking waste of everyone's time and extreme boredom. I think there must be a better way. Can anyone suggest an approach that won't ruin a child's interest?"
An anonymous reader writes "In this in-depth interview with LinuxQuestions.org, Patrick Volkerding discusses how he got involved with Linux and Open Source, the succession plan for Slackware, the Slackware development model, his opinion on the current trends in desktop environments, potentially disruptive changes to Linux such as systemd, his favorite beer and much more."
lightbox32 writes with the news as carried by MSNBC that "Best Buy's chairman and founder Richard Schulze has announced his resignation from the board of directors Thursday a year ahead of the planned transition at the helm of the struggling retailer. The resignation of Dunn and Schulze come after Best Buy reported a quarterly loss of $1.7 billion after same-store sales dropped 5 percent." This sounds like a bad omen for people who get their electronic fix there. For all its imperfections and limited range, when I'm looking for computer stuff new, at retail, and in person — meaning it's not at the Goodwill and I need it right now — I'm usually glad to be near a Fry's location. What brick-and-mortar stores make sense where you live?
snydeq writes "As the self-proclaimed 'cloud OS for the datacenter,' OpenStack is fast becoming one of the more intriguing movements in open source — complete with lofty ambitions, community in-fighting, and commercial appeal. But questions remain whether this project can reach its potential of becoming the new Linux. 'The allure of OpenStack is clear: Like Linux, OpenStack aims to provide a kernel around which all kinds of software vendors can build businesses. But with OpenStack, we're talking multiple projects to provide agile cloud management of compute, storage, and networking resources across the data center — plus authentication, self-service, resource monitoring, and a slew of other projects. It's hugely ambitious, perhaps the most far-reaching open source project ever, although still at a very early stage. ... Clearly, the sky-high aspirations of OpenStack both fuel its outrageous momentum and incur the risk of overreach and collapse, as it incites all manner of competition. The promise is big, but the success of OpenStack is by no means assured.'"
Barence writes with this news as carried by PC Pro: "Intel claims it is making significant improvements to the multicore performance of Android — but isn't sure if it's willing to share them with the open-source community. Speaking to journalists in London, Intel's mobile chief Mike Bell said that Intel's engineers were making significant improvements to Android's scheduler to improve its multicore performance. 'Android doesn't make as effective use of multicore as it could,' he said. However, when pressed by PC Pro on whether those improvements would be shared with the open-source community and Intel's competitors, Bell remained non-committal. 'Where we are required to give back to open source, we do,' said Bell. 'In cases where it's not required to be open source, I'm going to think about it. I don't like doing R&D for competitors if they're not going to contribute themselves,' said Bell, before adding that 'in general, our philosophy is to give things back.'"
An anonymous reader writes "CERT/CC has called out AMD for having insecure video drivers. AMD/ATI video drivers are incompatible with system-wide ASLR. 'Always On' DEP combined with 'Always On' ASLR are effective exploit mitigations. However, most people don't know about 'Always On' ASLR since Microsoft had to hide it from EMET with an 'EnableUnsafeSettings' registry key — because AMD/ATI video drivers will cause a BSOD on boot if 'Always On' ASLR is enabled."
Hugh Pickens writes "We are often told that the smartest cities and nations do the best and economists typically measure smart cities by education level, calculating the cities or metros with the largest percentage of college grads or the largest shares of adults with advanced degrees. Now Richard Florida writes that a new metric developed by Lumos Labs based on their cognitive training and tracking software Lumosity seeks to track "brain performance" or cognitive capacity of cities in a more direct way by measuring the cognitive performance of more than one million users in the United States who use their games against their location using IP geolocation software. Lumosity's website offers forty games designed to sharpen a wide range of cognitive skills. Individual scores were recorded in five key cognitive areas: memory, processing speed, flexibility, attention, and problem solving.The data was normalized into a basic brain performance index controlling for age and gender. The results are shown on a map from Zara Matheson of the Martin Prosperity Institute that shows the brainy metro index across US metro areas with the top five brainy clusters in Charlottesville Virginia, Lafayette Indiana, Anchorage Alaska, Madison Wisconsin, and the San Francisco-Oakland-San Jose area. The result is not driven principally by college students, according to Daniel Sternberg, the Lumosity data scientist who developed the metro brain performance measure. 'Since our analysis controlled for age, the reason they score well is not simply that they have a lot of young people,' says Sternberg. 'Instead, our analysis seems to show that users living in university communities tend to perform better than users of the same age in other locations.'"
As reported here recently, millions of LinkedIn password hashes have been leaked online. An anonymous reader writes "Now, Poul-Henning Kamp a developer known for work on various projects and the author of the md5crypt password scrambler asks everybody to migrate to a stronger password scrambler without undue delay. From the blog post: 'New research has shown that it can be run at a rate close to 1 million checks per second on COTS GPU hardware, which means that it is as prone to brute-force attacks as the DES based UNIX crypt was back in 1995: Any 8 character password can be found in a couple of days. The default algorithm for storing password hashes in /etc/shadow is MD5. RHEL / CentOS / FreeBSD user can migrate to SHA-512 hashing algorithms.'" Reader Curseyoukhan was one of several to also point out that dating site eHarmony got the same treatment as LinkedIn. Update: 06/07 20:13 GMT by T : An anonymous reader adds a snippet from Help Net Security, too: "Last.fm has piped up to warn about a leak of their own users' passwords. Users who have logged in to the site were greeted today by a warning asking them to change their password while the site investigates a security problem. Following the offered link to learn more, they landed on another page with another warning."
mikejuk writes "The recent release of Visual Studio 2012 contained a UI element that few believed could make it into the final version — ALL-CAPS menus. After lots of user criticism and disbelief, Microsoft has moved swiftly to do something about it — by tweaking the typography. '... we explored designs with and without uppercase styling. In the end we determined it to be a very effective way of providing structure and emphasis to the top menu area in Visual Studio 2012.' This must be a new meaning of the word 'structure,' because putting the menu items into all-caps means that they are all the same height. When each menu items starts with a cap then there is structure because you can see the change in height, marking the start of the next menu item. The idea that putting a menu into all caps adds structure is something that is very difficult to see. If you wanted to put structure into a menu, well how about color? Oh wait, I forgot the design department dumped color in favour of the 'everything-is-grey UI.' Developers are the people who invented CamelCase to make sure that the structure of run together words would stand out better — and now we are asked to believe that making a menu all-caps adds structure. I don't think so."
theodp writes "Remember the Pre-Cogs in Minority Report? Slate's Will Oremus does, and wonders if Google could similarly help the police apprehend criminals based on foreknowledge collected from searches. Oremus writes: 'At around 3:45 a.m. on March 24, someone in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., used a mobile phone to Google "chemicals to passout a person." Then the person searched Ask.com for "making people faint." Then Google again, for "ways to kill people in their sleep," "how to suffocate someone," and "how to poison someone." The phone belonged to 23-year-old Nicole Okrzesik. Later that morning, police allege, she and her boyfriend strangled 19-year-old Juliana Mensch as she slept on the floor of their apartment.' In theory, Oremus muses, Google or Ask.com could have flagged Okrzesik's search queries as suspicious and dispatched cops to the scene before Mensch's assailants had the chance to do her in." I bet you're already thinking of just a few reasons why this might not such a good idea.
An anonymous reader writes "In spite of Linux's great networking capabilities, there seems to be a shortage of suitable hardware for building an enterprise-grade networking platform. I've had success on smaller projects with the Soekris offerings but they are suboptimal for large-scale deployment due to their single-board non-redundant design (eg., single power supply, lack of backup 'controller'). What is the closest thing to a modular Linux-capable platform with some level of hardware redundancy and substantial bus/backplane throughput?"