Alcatel-Lucent hat Details zum „Shift Plan“ des Unternehmens, der für die nächsten drei Jahre gilt, bekannt gegeben. Das Unternehmen will in Zukunft den Fokus auf IP Networking und Ultra-Broadband Access legen.
Die Kampagne "I am Bradley Manning" wird von zahlreichen Prominenten unterstützt, darunter die Schauspieler Maggie Gyllenhaal und Russell Brand sowie der Musiker Tom Morello. In einem fünfminütigen Video fordern sie ein faires Verfahren für Manning, der bereits seit 2010 ohne Anklage festgehalten wird.
Deutschlands Bundeskanzlerin Angela Merkel (CDU) hat mit einer Bemerkung über das Internet für heitere und spöttische Reaktionen im Netz gesorgt. „Das Internet ist für uns alle Neuland“, sagte Merkel heute auf eine Frage zum Internetspähprogramm „Prism“ bei einer Pressekonferenz mit US-Präsident Barack Obama im Kanzleramt.
Der Onlinehändler Fab.com hat in einer neuen Finanzierungsrunde 150 Millionen Dollar (112 Mio. Euro) von Investoren eingesammelt und orientiert sich damit Richtung Asien. Das chinesische Internetunternehmen Tencent steige als „strategischer Investor“ mit der Aussicht auf den Einstieg in neue Märkte neu ein, sagte Fab-Mitgründer und Chef Jason Goldberg gegenüber der Nachrichtenagentur DPA.
Sunrise hat mit der Aufschaltung seines 4G/LTE-Netzes mobiles Highspeed Internet für alle ihre Anwender angekündigt. Demnach können ab sofort sämtliche Sunrise-Kunden mit 4G/LTE-fähigen Geräten neu mobil mit bis zu 100 Mbit/s im Web surfen.
Atos Schweiz hat von der Schweizerischen Rettungsflugwacht Rega den Zuschlag für die Wartung und den Support des neuen Einsatzleitsystems erhalten. Dabei übernimmt der IT-Dienstleister einem Communiqué zufolge zusätzlich zur Wartung von verschiedenen Client-Komponenten und dem Support mit einem 7x24-Servicedesk für Second und Third Level auch den Betrieb der Kernkomponenten der Kommunikation. Der Vertrag hat eine Laufzeit von fünf Jahren, heisst es.
Die Management- und Technologieberatung Bearingpoint hat den Gewinner des von ihr ausgetragenen europäischen Studenten-wettbewerbs Be.project gekürt: Ein Team der ETH Zürich hat die Jury in Brüssel offenbar mit dem Projekt “Smargetech” überzeugt und sicherte sich den ersten Platz.
Die Schweizer Online-Anbieter sind in Bedrängnis: In vielen Branchen wuchs das Angebot in den letzten fünf Jahren stärker als die Nachfrage. Neben der Konkurrenz drücken die hohe Preistransparenz und steigende Werbekosten auf die Erträge. Um rentabel zu arbeiten, müssen die Online-Händler weiter wachsen.
Das Soziale Netzwerk Facebook hat nach eigenen Angaben mittlerweile mehr als eine Million Werbekunden. Er wolle den "über eine Million Unternehmen" danken, die bei Facebook als Werbekunden aktiv seien, schrieb Marketing-Manager Dan Levy am Dienstag in einem Blog.
Der chinesische Netzwerkausrüster und Telefonhersteller Huawei will nach eigenem Bekunden den finnischen Konkurrenten Nokia nicht kaufen. Es gebe keine derartigen Pläne, sagte Huawei-Sprecher Bill Plummer am Dienstag. Er reagierte damit auf einen Bericht der "Financial Times".
The traditional clamshell laptop will always be with us, but thanks to the innovation of the Intel-inspired Ultrabook, a wide range of new mobile computer designs has recently hit the market. Offering a vast amount of flexibility, these new designs offer considerable freedom, letting you choose the Ultrabook™ that works best for you. Here's a guide to the various types of Ultrabook designs you'll find available today. Standard / Laptop Style Don't fret if you just want the basics and don't want to reinvent the wheel: Ultrabook systems with a standard clamshell design are widely available. These systems look and operate just like any laptop computer, except they’re often much thinner and lighter. Also, many now come equipped with touchscreens, so you can use the keyboard and touchpad to navigate Windows, or draw on the screen with your fingertip. At first these Ultrabook systems appear to be pretty standard, except they're equipped with new hinges that allow the screen to rotate around a full 360 degrees. In other words, you can push the screen back so that it lies flat against the table, and keep going another 180 degrees so that the screen is facing outward from the bottom of the laptop. Next just flip the Ultrabook over so that the keyboard is on the bottom of the machine and the screen is facing you. Presto, you've turned your laptop into a keyboard-free, slate-style tablet.
Microsoft Wednesday announced several new apps that have arrived or will arrive within the Windows Store, including the Vevo app for music videos and an updated version of Where’s My Water? But if you’re still hoping for a Facebook app for Windows 8, keep waiting. Really, ever since Windows 8 was released last October, many have wondered when Microsoft—or Facebook—would release an app supporting the over 1 billion users who use the Facebook service. While many apps—such as Pandora, for example— still haven’t made the transition over to the Windows 8 platform, Facebook seems like a significant omission.
Intel said Wednesday that is has joined the board of directors of the Alliance for Wireless Power (A4WP), a consortium developing technology for wirelessly charging electronic devices. However, Intel said last year that Ultrabooks capable of wireless charging would arrive in 2013—a promise the company has yet to make good on. Virtually all of the major chipmakers have now joined A4WP, a spokesman for the group said, including Broadcom, Qualcomm, and Samsung, among others. A4WP uses near-field magnetic resonance technology to charge a nearby device, like a cell phone, if both the power source and the target device support the technology. “Intel believes the A4WP specification, particularly the use of near-field magnetic resonance technology, can provide a compelling consumer experience and enable new usage models that make device charging almost automatic,” said Navin Shenoy, vice president, PC client group and general manager, mobile client platform division at Intel, in a statement. “In joining A4WP, we look forward to working alongside other member companies and contributing to standards that help fuel an ecosystem of innovative solutions capable of simultaneously charging a range of devices, from low-power accessories to smartphones, tablets, and Ultrabooks.” At its Intel Developer Forum last year, the company said that it would add wireless charging capabilities to its Ultrabook platform sometime this year.
A telephone records surveillance program run by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and National Security Agency raises serious privacy concerns and should be reined in, some U.S. senators said Wednesday. Some members of the Senate Judiciary Committee pushed for changes to the surveillance program that allows the two agencies to broadly collect telephone call records from U.S. carriers, with some lawmakers calling for the records to remain with carriers until the agencies have a suspicion of a telephone number’s ties to terrorist activity. “I remain concerned that, as a country, we’ve yet to strike the right balance between intelligence gathering into the FBI and the civil liberties and privacy rights of Americans,” said Senator Patrick Leahy, a Vermont Democrat, during a hearing on oversight of the FBI. “The American people deserve to know how broad investigative laws ... are being interpreted and used to conduct electronic surveillance.” FBI Director Robert Mueller defended the recently exposed phone records collection program, saying it was a critical piece of antiterrorism investigations. The phone records collection program authorized by the Patriot Act has been a key tool in disrupting 10 to 12 terrorist plots since Sept. 11, 2001, he told lawmakers. NSA officials said Tuesday that the two surveillance programs have helped disrupt more than 50 terrorist plots since then.
The freewheeling flow of information on public social media sites may cause many people in conservative, highly regulated industries such as financial services to shudder. But one Canadian firm has taken the plunge, believing its employees can use social tools in a safe and ultimately profitable way. The benefits of using social media outweigh the regulatory overhead, said Silu Modi, vice president of digital marketing at Macquarie Private Wealth, during a session this week at the E2 conference in Boston. Benefits include the ability for Macquarie’s specialized brokers “to demonstrate they really know their industry” and achieve “thought leadership” through blog posts and Twitter messages, Modi said. In other words, brokers that develop strong social personas can help raise Macquarie’s profile and bring in more business. To that end, Modi noted, 25 percent of LinkedIn users hold senior management titles or above and 41 percent earn six-figure salaries, he said. “If you’re a private wealth firm, that’s exactly what you’re looking for.” But Macquarie faced some challenges in developing its social strategy. “The regulators put a nice little box around what you can do before you start a social media program,” he said. For one thing, all social media activity must be captured and maintained for years, and even user profile information has get the sign-off from the compliance department, he said.
SAP has significantly improved the security of its products over the past few years but many of its customers are negligent with their deployments, which exposes them to potential attacks that could cripple their businesses, according to security researchers. The biggest issue is that companies expose insecure SAP services to the Internet—not only HTTP services, but also critical administrative interfaces, Alexander Polyakov, chief technology officer at ERPScan, a developer of security monitoring products for SAP systems, said Tuesday. Between 5 percent and 10 percent of companies that use SAP products expose critical services to the Internet that shouldn’t be publicly accessible, Polyakov said. This happens because they want to enable remote management or because of improper configurations, he said. Most of the services have vulnerabilities that can be easily attacked, Polyakov said.
Technology has changed everything we know about the office. Now it is threatening to get rid of the office as we know it. , a virtual office space provider, show just how profound this shift in attitudes toward traditional working environments has become. Chief Operating Officer Tom Camplese sums up the results simply, saying "We believe there is a paradigm shift happening in our culture as it relates to work style. The work culture of today is very different than it was even 10 years ago, and individuals are now aspiring to work differently and create not only their own work style, but their own work rules.” Three thousand people, Americans and Canadians aged 18 and up, were surveyed over an 18-month period that ended this April. The results paint an interesting picture of a rapidly evolving modern work force. The desire for unprecedented work flexibility is the key touchstone of the surveys. That flexibility is manifest in just about every facet of the work environment. Workers want to decide where they work (home, office, coffee shop), when they work ("9 to 5" is all but dead), and how they work (preferring to use their own equipment over corporate-issued machines). Already, 70 percent of workers say they work from an alternative location than the office on a regular basis, and 66 percent said they use or want to use a laptop or tablet to allow this kind of flexibility.
Demand for mainframe and high-performance Unix servers is falling, but a new wave of SPARC and IBM Power chips for the servers will be unwrapped at the Hot Chips conference in late August. IBM, Oracle and Fujitsu—the main suppliers of Unix server chips—will talk about their next-generation RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computer) chips at the conference, which will be held Stanford University from Aug. 25 to 28. The chips typically go into high-availability servers, which are falling out of favor to the inexpensive and flexible x86 servers. IBM will talk about the "next-generation Power microprocessor," according to the conference agenda. The next set of SPARC processors will also be detailed: Oracle will talk about SPARC M6, described in the agenda as the company's "next generation processor for massively scalable symmetric multiprocessor data center servers," and Fujitsu will talk about SPARC64 X+, successor to the current 16-core SPARC64 X.
Microsoft will pay security researchers for finding and reporting vulnerabilities in the preview version of its Internet Explorer 11 (IE 11) browser, for finding novel techniques to bypass exploit mitigations present in Windows 8.1 or later versions, and for coming up with new ideas to defend against exploits. The monetary rewards will be paid through the company launched Wednesday. The payouts will range between $500 and $11,000 for vulnerabilities found in IE 11 Preview, depending on the type of vulnerability and quality of the report, and up to $100,000 for mitigation bypasses in Windows 8.1 and later versions. There is also a defense bonus of up to $50,000, the BlueHat Bonus for Defense. Participants must submit a technical paper that describes an idea that could be used to block an exploitation technique that bypasses the latest Windows platform mitigations. The reward will depend on the quality and uniqueness of the idea, Microsoft said in the program’s guidelines.
Java continues to be Public Enemy No. 1 when it comes to computer and network security. Oracle released a huge update for the virtually ubiquitous software, but attackers aren’t done exploiting Java as the weakest link in the security chain, and Oracle isn’t securing it fast enough. . It also enables online certificate revocation in Java by default, to allow Java to verify in real time whether certificates used to sign Java code have been revoked to prevent execution of malware. , “All vulnerabilities except three can be exploited remotely by an attacker, and in most cases, the attacker can take complete control of the system.” , has dubbed 2013 “the year of the Java vulnerability.” Bailey points out that Java is widely used across multiple platforms, and that alone makes it a juicy target for attackers. “Java is squarely in the crosshairs of many hackers and security researchers and that’s not going to change in the short term.”
It looks like we aren’t the only ones impressed by the potential in Qualcomm’s powerful new Snapdragon 800 chip. ” of Microsoft’s Surface RT tablet. While the report seems innocuous enough at first glance, the one-line rumor actually intrigues on multiple levels—not the least of which is the allure of the first potential cellular-enabled Surface slate. Even so, beefed-up processors alone won’t cure what ails Windows RT. Before we get into that, though, the “some new versions” line—if accurate—suggests that Microsoft may release several different models of the Surface RT in the coming months.
almost seems redundant. Google is already a recognized leader in mapping services, so why does it need to buy a mapping company? The answer is that maps aren’t just maps anymore, and Waze will help Google move from mapping to social mapping. It might look at first glance like the Waze purchase is a predatory move. Google has deep pockets and it can afford to spend money to buy Waze simply to prevent rivals from doing so. It may not actually use or incorporate Waze, because the goal of buying Waze is purely a strategic move to keep competitors in the rearview mirror. That’s not the case, though. Maps aren’t just maps any more. Maps are a search engine in and of themselves—a trove of information that helps people get from Point A to Point B as efficiently as possible, and that helps them make smart choices about where to go and what to do once they arrive. I’m dating myself, but once upon a time we relied on printed maps from AAA called TripTiks to navigate road trips. Then Mapquest came along, and we could just research our own routes and print our own maps. The advent of smartphones, and the rapid advances in mapping, and location-tracking services, however, combined with relevant, real-world information from social networks, has brought the concept of mapping to a whole new level.
It seems you cannot go a day without hearing about someone or some group hacking a website or stealing credit card and other sensitive data from e-commerce sites. So how do you protect your e-commerce site from being hacked and sensitive customer data from being stolen? CIO.com asked dozens of e-commerce and security experts to find out. Following are their top 15 tips for protecting your e-commerce site from hacking and fraud. “Put your e-commerce site on a platform that uses a sophisticated object-orientated programming language,” says Shawn Hess, software development manager, . “We’ve used plenty of different open-source e-commerce platforms in the past, and the one we’re using now is by far the most secure,” Hess says. “Our administration panel is inaccessible to attackers because it’s only available on our internal network and completely removed from our public facing servers. Additionally, it has a secondary authentication that authenticates users with our internal Windows network.”
Start-up Cumulus Networks this week has emerged with a Linux network operating system designed for programmable data centers like the ones Google and Facebook are building. , Cumulus Linux is intended to run on commodity network hardware and bring open source extensibility to high capacity data centers. Linux did the same for data center servers 15 years ago, Cumulus officials state, and ushered in widely-used innovations like virtualization. But networking has lagged the trend -- advancements like software-defined networking (SDN) and programmability are very recent, and strategies from the major vendors are typically tied tightly to their own OSes and hardware. The Cisco ONE plan, for example, is tied to Cisco IOS, IOS-XR and NX-OS.
LeaseWeb, one of Europe’s biggest hosting providers, has wiped 630 servers that contained Megaupload data and countered claims from the company that the file-sharing site wasn’t warned. “This is the largest data massacre in the history of the Internet,” Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom said Wednesday on Twitter, where he criticized LeaseWeb for deleting the data. LeaseWeb did not warn Megaupload that it was about to delete the servers, Dotcom claimed, adding that they were informed Wednesday that the servers were deleted on Feb. 1. He maintained that Megaupload’s lawyers repeatedly asked LeaseWeb not to delete Megaupload servers while court proceedings are pending in the U.S, Dotcom said. LeaseWeb disputes Dotcom’s claims.
CERN is making the infrastructure that handles the data from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) more flexible by upgrading it with OpenStack for virtualization and Puppet for configuration management. The research organization’s objective is to change how it provides services to scientists working at the LHC, which runs in a 27-kilometer circular tunnel about 100 meters beneath the Swiss and French border at Geneva. “One of the things we have to contend with is how to scale our infrastructure fairly significantly with a fixed staff and fixed costs. With a fixed budget you can buy more and more equipment, but you can’t provide more and more services with the same number of people,” said Ian Bird, LHC computing grid project leader. But that may be possible if you change the way things are done. CERN’s goal is to become more efficient by moving in the direction of infrastructure-as-a-service and platform-as-a-service with a private cloud. The goal is to be able to more dynamically change how the infrastructure is used. Right now the accelerator is shut down so the CERN data center has a different workload from last year when the LHC was running, according to Bird.
As with all things tech, there are rabidly loyal fans of each of the four major mobile network providers, and strong opinions on all sides about which is the “best.” While Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, and T-Mobile each have their pros and cons, it’s virtually impossible to declare one the winner. Late last month, declared that AT&T takes the crown this year as the fastest mobile network provider. Kudos to AT&T, but the victory has little impact in the real world. There is obviously something to be said for choosing a mobile provider with fast, reliable 4G/LTE service. The reality, though, is that the most important benefits and pitfalls of a particular provider are subjective, and depend on where you intend to use the service. The fastest network in the nation is less important than the fastest network where you live and work and plan to use the service. I experienced that reality first hand when I moved a year and a half ago. I had been a devoted, long time AT&T customer. There were a handful of known “dead zones” in the area—small pockets where there was no AT&T signal and calls would drop—but I knew where they were, and how to avoid them. I could live with that.
A new role that requires traveling takes some getting used to, especially if you rarely leave the office. It suddenly becomes critical to squeeze in that bit of extra work while waiting for an airport transfer, relaxing at the hotel in the evenings, shuffling between meetings, or even when waiting for clients to show up for those meetings. With this in mind, here are several pointers to help maximize your productivity when traveling. In this age of Web services and access to instant information, the trickiest bit of a business trip is often getting Internet connectivity at unfamiliar or remote locations. While Wi-Fi hotspot access is generally great, it can sometimes be flaky due to congestion or misbehaving wireless access points in public locations. When faced with an errant Wi-Fi hotspot, a good guideline is to devote no more than 10 minutes and one system restart to resolving the problem. Beyond that, changing venues or switching to a mobile hostpot is a more judicious use of time.
The shift toward smaller tablets will accelerate in the second half of the year when a slew of tablet makers, including Apple, introduce new models with screens 8 inches or smaller, said Richard Shim, an analyst with DisplaySearch. Although larger-sized tablets dominated 2012—those 9 inches and larger accounted for 60% of sales last year—the going-small switch has picked up unexpected speed, Shim said. post. DisplaySearch estimates that for the year, 66% of all tablets sold will sport screens smaller than 9 inches. Last month, rival research firm IDC said tablets 8 inches and smaller would account for 55% of the total for 2013.
Oracle addressed 40 security issues in Java and enabled online certificate revocation checking by default in its scheduled critical patch update for Java on Tuesday. Thirty-four vulnerabilities patched in the newly released Java 7 Update 25 (Java 7u25) version affect only client deployments of Java. Another four affect both client and server deployments, one affects the Java installer and one the Javadoc tool that's used to create HTML documentation files. Many of the client-only vulnerabilities received the maximum score on the vulnerability severity scale used by Oracle. These flaws can be exploited by attackers to take control of computers by hosting malicious Java applets—Java Web applications—on remote servers and tricking users to load them in their browsers. The large number of Web-based attacks that targeted Java users this year by exploiting vulnerabilities in the Java browser plug-in prompted concern about the security worthiness of the Java platform among home users and in enterprise environments, where Java is also frequently used on servers.
The Wi-Fi Alliance is finally kicking off a certification program for routers, adapters, and other wireless networking gear based on the IEEE 802.11ac draft standard. The organization has a strong track record when it comes to ensuring that networking products will be interoperable even when the standards they’re based on have yet to be finalized, so this is a positive development. As it did with the 802.11n wireless networking standard, the IEEE is taking its sweet time to . In fact, the responsible working group isn’t expected to finish its work until November, and final ratification isn’t expected until February 2014. That lengthy timeline hasn’t stopped manufacturers from shipping 802.11ac gear, of course; products based on the draft standard have been on store shelves since August 2012. But buyers haven’t had any assurances that those products will work together. So why is the certification program launching now? “We want to ensure that the standard is substantially mature,” said Wi-Fi Alliance senior marketing manager Kevin Robinson in an embargoed interview last week. “There is work that we have to go through to ensure interoperability, and [we’re] fielding a test bed to certify that.” The Wi-Fi Alliance launched a similar certification program back in 2007 for networking equipment based on the draft 802.11n standard. Unlike that effort, however, the 802.11ac certification program will not acknowledge the standard’s draft status and is being described as simply “Wi-Fi CERTIFIED™ ac.”
You adore your laptop. It lets you get down to business wherever you happen to be—airport lounge, coffee shop, your home office. It’s the key to your competitive edge. That is, until its battery croaks. Just as you’re putting the final details on your PowerPoint presentation. At the airport. Two hours before takeoff. And with no power outlet in sight. At that instant, you begin to wonder why you ever bought the ever-lovin’ boat anchor in the first place. But love will bloom anew as soon as you recharge. Avoid the heartache, however temporary: Follow these five tips for maximizing your laptop’s run time. One surefire way to ensure that your laptop is always ready for action is to plug it into an AC outlet whenever possible. Keeping the machine fully charged makes it far more likely that you will always have the juice you need to complete your work. Purchase at least one extra AC adapter, so you’ll always have one in your office and one in your laptop bag for travel. If you work at home frequently, consider buying a third adapter to leave there.
Hewlett-Packard and Samsung Electronics will now ensure that their PCs in China are installed with licensed Windows and Office software as part of new agreements signed with Microsoft meant to fight piracy. of PC resellers in China to stop dealing in pirated copies of its software products. Wednesday's agreements call for the two companies to also require their direct channel partners to promote genuine Microsoft software. with Lenovo, China's largest PC maker. At the time, Microsoft said the deal would help limit and prevent PCs, moving "downstream" through China's channels, from being installed with pirated versions of Windows.
Alcatel-Lucent will refocus on IP networking and ultra-broadband access in mobile and fixed-line networks as it seeks to return to profitability by 2015. Announcing the company's "Shift Plan" in Paris on Wednesday, CEO Michel Combes said the company now recognized that the markets for core networking equipment and access networks are very different, and will in future manage its activities accordingly. In core IP networking, where an explosion in data traffic and the move to cloud computing is driving purchases, Alcatel-Lucent will pursue a revenue growth strategy, he said. On the other hand, the company will aim to maximize cash and profitability in access networks, where customers are upgrading or replacing existing equipment and sales are flat, he said. Combes said he aims to sell off €1 billion in assets and to cut annual operating costs by €1 billion. However, he refused to say whether that will result in further job cuts.
Your current smartphone’s processor may be fast, but Qualcomm is hoping to show you a whole new definition of mobile performance. On Tuesday, the company staged a benchmarking exhibition in San Francisco to demonstrate the raw speed of its Snapdragon 800 chip, designated for “premium” smartphone deployment later this year. Qualcomm already has a footprint in many of the top handsets. The 400 series of chips is included in both the HTC One and the Samsung Galaxy S4, for example. Qualcomm hasn’t announced which phones and tablets will use the 800 series, but, for what it’s worth, the company showed off the new chip using the 700MHz LTE band that’s specific to AT&T—although that means little at this point. at the Consumer Electronics Show this past January, the company said the 800 series will appear in “premium” mobile devices in the second half of the year and provide as much as a 75 percent performance boost over Qualcomm’s current Snapdragon S4 chip. The 800-series chips include a quad-core CPU, known as the 28-nm Krait 400, with each core running at up to 2.3 GHz. It has a new Adreno 330 GPU, integrates a 4G LTE modem for data rates of up to 150 Mbps, and supports the 802.11ac WiFi standard.