Microsoft’s TechNet subscription service wasn’t a free lunch, but it was about the closest thing to it for IT pros and Microsoft enthusiasts, and soon it’ll be gone. Microsoft announced Monday that it as it phases in a set of free services that won’t be quite a sweet as the TechNet deal. Microsoft says the TechNet site will not go away, just the subscription service for software. TechNet subscriptions were an incredibly inexpensive way for IT professionals to get free access to a very long list of Microsoft software for evaluation purposes. Other Microsoft fans, and more than a few software pirates, also enjoyed the product keys and other benefits the subscription provided.
Mozilla says a tablet PC based on its new Firefox operating system is coming soon, although it won’t say just how soon that could be. The this week, and with that launch some attention at Mozilla is now turning to a tablet, said Brendan Eich, chief technology officer for Mozilla. Eich created the JavaScript programming language and is a proponent of open Web technologies on which Firefox OS is built.
Monday morning, Microsoft announced that a plethora of new channel partners will . Mere hours later, one of the new resellers—CDW—was caught offering a previously unannounced variant of the Surface Pro, which will be aimed squarely at businesses and other organizations. So much for basking in the afterglow! The , reveals a $1200 Surface Pro with a 256GB solid state drive. Currently, Microsoft only officially offers Surface Pro tablets with either 64GB or 128GB of onboard storage, at $900 and $1000, respectively. Aside from the increased storage capacity, the 256GB Surface Pro mirrors the hardware of its siblings. Here’s what a Microsoft representative had to say about the new hardware: Yes, there will be limited availability of a 256GB version of Surface Pro in the U.S. exclusively through the commercial channel and authorized Surface resellers. We’re excited about the resellers we’ve named in today’s announcement because they are so well equipped and experienced to work with their customers to develop the precise/best solutions for their unique needs.
, and enhancing the capabilities of OneNote to deliver a more consistent, and powerful platform for business users. Metro interface. Today’s update makes the cross-platform functionality more reliable and consistent. I’ve been a fan of OneNote for some time, but I did abandon it for a while after getting frustrated that changes I made on one device were not being reflected elsewhere. The syncing often seemed to be broken. The value of having OneNote available on disparate operating systems and devices is greatly diminished when the data doesn’t sync up properly, or when OneNote looks and acts differently from one device to the next. The various OneNote applications have been re-architected for more reliable syncing. The retooling will also make it easier for Microsoft to update the apps in the future—part of that “rapid release” mantra Ballmer was preaching last week at Microsoft’s BUILD developer conference.
Some websites and mobile app developers are confused about how to comply with revised rules governing the online collection of personal information from children that took effect in the U.S. Monday, critics said. , the Federal Trade Commission is restricting targeted advertising aimed at children and requiring that websites and mobile apps take extra care when handling children’s cookies, geolocation information, photos, and other identifying information. The FTC last about complying with the new rule just weeks ago, said Morgan Reed, executive director of the Association for Competitive Technology (ACT), a trade group that represents mobile app developers. App developers continue to have questions about how to comply with the revised rules, he said.
Ah, Mondays. Wonder why your employees are all yawning and glassy-eyed today? It may be easy to blame it on the hot weather or overindulgences over the weekend, but researchers are pointing fingers at another potential culprit that is increasingly interfering with our ability to get a good night's sleep: Smartphones and tablet PCs. that researchers are particularly interested in. Here's why it's a problem. Right before bedtime, bright lights are the enemy, inhibiting the production of melatonin, which helps you fall (and stay) asleep. Smart phones and tablets have the advantage of being small, but because they are so bright and so close to your face, the overall impact is similar to being in a fairly well-lighted room. (The light from your phone alone is equal to about half that of "ordinary room light.") Making things even worse, short-wavelength light in the blue portion of the spectrum is the most disruptive to sleep patterns, and that's the type of light that is typically over-produced by modern LCD screens. Poor sleep, it should go without saying, is a factor in all kinds of problems, ranging from low productivity at work to increased traffic accidents to diseases like diabetes and cancer. for late-night bathroom runs in order to minimize sleep disruptions—as a way to keep exposure to that blue wavelength light to a minimum.The problems are compounded over time, so the more you use your phone or tablet at night, the worse it gets. Since more and more consumers are using these devices in bed—to send emails, watch movies, read books, play games, and more—the problem is becoming nearly universal. It's especially problematic with younger users, who habitually use their portable devices in bed every night.
A U.S. court has decided that the class-action designation of the copyright lawsuit brought against Google by the Authors Guild over the company’s book-scanning project was “premature,” and has returned the suit to a lower court for consideration of fair use issues. The Authors Guild filed its suit in 2005, arguing that Google’s book-scanning project, which lets users search for and read the text of certain books online, has of authors whose works have been digitized. Judge Denny Chin, formerly of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, allowed the class-action lawsuit to move forward last year. But in a ruling filed Monday by three circuit judges in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, it was decided that Judge Chin erred in assigning class-action status to the case and that the merits of Google’s fair use defense need further consideration. Google maintains that it is not violating copyright law, and that the “fair use” principle, which allows for reproduction of limited copyrighted material without permission, protects its actions.
While the PC gaming world waits for Steam to kick off its annual summer games sale, Amazon gets an early jump with some deals of its own. , which typically rotates through various deals as its sale period progresses, Amazon lists all of its discounts up front, so you can peruse the store and purchase at your leisure. ] .
Like many Windows 8 users, I spend most of my time using Desktop mode, which affords me a more Windows 7-like experience. However, every so often the OS kicks me into an app that I don't especially like or want to use. For example, my home-phone service (Ooma) delivers voice-mail messages to me as MP3 email attachments. When I open one, it fires up Microsoft's Music app, which inconveniently bounces me out of Desktop mode. And, needless to say, if I want to listen to a song from my collection, double-clicking it produces the same result: the Music app. I want audio files to open in the same place they did in Windows 7: Windows Media Player. Fortunately, that program is still around in Windows 8; it's just a matter of modifying a setting so it becomes the default. Here's how:
Microsoft launches a channel partner program Monday to help drive sales of its Surface tablet to companies, schools, and other organizations. The program is operational now in the U.S. with a small set of partners and will be expanded domestically and internationally in the coming months. It arrives amidst criticism that Surface—and Windows 8 tablets in general—haven’t sold well since they hit the market late last year. Microsoft already has a program for retailers who sell Surface primarily to consumers. That program is operational in about 10,000 stores in 30 countries. However, Microsoft has only a limited direct-sales program for reaching organizations that want to buy Surface tablets in bulk.
Microsoft’s Windows 8 is now a more popular operating system than the reviled Windows Vista, eliminating a source of embarrassment as Microsoft’s latest OS slowly continues to gather steam. According to , Windows 8 captured 5.10 percent of all desktop systems the firm tracks for the month of June. Vista’s market share now stands at 4.62 percent. Of course, both will need a few months (or years) before they pass Windows XP and Windows 7, both of which dipped about half a percentage point’s worth of share to finish the month with 44.37 percent and 37.17 percent, respectively. There was good news on the browser front as well: Net Applications also reported that Internet Explorer 10 surged 4.26 percentage points to finish with 13.52 percent of the desktop market. That marked the first time that IE10, which shipped with Windows 8 (but), passed Internet Explorer 9.0, which fell 3.68 points to 11.71 percent of the desktop market.
A critical vulnerability that could allow remote attackers to access sensitive enterprise log-in credentials and other data was fixed last week in Crowd, a single sign-on (SSO) and identity management tool used by large organizations to simplify access to their internal Web applications and services. According to Atlassian, the Sydney-based software company that develops Crowd, the product , including large banks, car manufacturers, government agencies, telecommunication companies, software firms, online services providers, universities and others. Crowd can be used to link identities between Active Directory, LDAP and other directory services; Atlassian’s popular bug tracking, collaboration, project management and code repository tools; third party services like Google Apps, Apache or Subversion, and custom in-house developed Web applications. The newly patched vulnerability stems from the way in which Crowd parses external XML entities defined in Document Type Definition (DTD) headers and is a variation of a vulnerability known as CVE-2012-2926 that was reported and patched back in 2012, researchers from security consultancy firm Command Five said Friday in a .
It’s tough to keep track of all of your passwords. In spite of advances in biometrics, and increased attention on the value of two-factor authentication, passwords remain the primary means of digital security. They're also one of the weakest links in the security chain. If we can’t get rid of passwords, we need a better way to manage them. Remember when passwords were going to die out? Bill Gates told an audience, "There is no doubt that over time, people are going to rely less and less on passwords. People use the same password on different systems, they write them down and they just don't meet the challenge for anything you really want to secure." That was in early 2004. Nearly a decade later we still , and passwords still suffer from all of the same weaknesses Gates described. I used to be guilty of recycling the same password across virtually every account as well. The sites and services I use broke me of the habit because the password policies are so different from one to the next that it became very difficult to even find a password that meets the requirements of all of them.
Apple is under investigation by the French competition authority, which has raided the company's offices in France, and those of several distributors, a spokesman for the authority said Monday. The spokesman declined to say which distributors were raided, nor why Apple and its distributors were under investigation. The Autorité de la Concurrence can take action against anticompetitive activities such as the formation of cartels or abuse of a dominant market position either on its own initiative or as a result of a complaint. In this case it's not clear what prompted the authority's action but in April last year, Apple reseller eBizcuss filed suit against Apple at the Paris Commercial Court, accusing it of abuse of a dominant market position. However, before the case reached trial eBizcuss went into liquidation, and its eight stores retailing Apple products have now closed.
European Union politicians at both national and European levels Monday demanded that the U.S. answer allegations of spying on E.U. embassies, while others called for asylum for NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. Speaking on behalf of the European Commission, spokeswoman Pia Ahrenkilde Hansen described the weekend reports in newspapers in Germany as "disturbing." She said that Catherine Ashton, head of the European External Action Service, asked U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry directly to respond to allegations that the U.S. bugged E.U. offices in New York and Washington. "Clarity and transparency is what we expect from our partners and allies, and this is what we expect from the United States. The next step is in the hands of the United States," said Ahrenkilde Hansen. However, she would not be drawn on whether a lack of an explanation from the U.S. could derail the upcoming Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) negotiations between the E.U. and the U.S. Meanwhile Kerry said in a statement that the U.S. National Security Agency's (NSA) activities were "not unusual" in international relations. "But beyond that, I'm not going to comment any further until I have all of the facts and find out precisely what the situation is," he said at a news conference in Brunei.
Microsoft Monday said it will appeal a trademark lawsuit over its SkyDrive cloud-storage service it lost to the British Sky Broadcasting (BSkyB) Group. of the England and Wales High Court that was handed down on Friday following an eight-day trial in April. According to BSkyB, Microsoft infringed on two registered Community trade marks (CTMs) and two UK registered trade marks (UKTMs). The court ruled that Microsoft’s use of the SkyDrive name is likely to cause confusion among consumers and therefore infringes on the Sky trademark. The judge referred to the ease of confusion between SkyDrive’s cloud services and Sky’s broadband services. The court also determined that the name was possibly detrimental to the Sky brand, so it could be viewed as trademark infringement on this ground too.
Already a huge player in the field, Nuance is taking its flagship OCR product, OmniPage, to new levels. The new Ultimate version features, text-to-speech, a LaunchPad app that embraces the Windows 8 Metro look, better re-creation of complex document layouts, and editing PDF forms. But at $500, OmniPage Ultimate makes the competition look like bargains.
The largest Bitcoin exchange has filed key paperwork with the US Treasury's anti-money laundering agency, but it may have come too late. Mt. Gox, based in Tokyo, registered on Thursday with the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) as a money services business (MSB), according to FinCEN's website. The adoption of Bitcoin, a virtual currency that can be transferred worldwide for free using peer-to-peer software, has been stymied by concerns over compliance with different countries' anti-money laundering and financial regulations. The order alleged Mt. Gox failed to register as a money transmitting business, which is required by many states and the federal government.
, Microsoft managed to craft a fairly capable reimagining of its new-look OS in the short time since Windows 8 debuted last October. : Windows 8.1 refines the blend, making the core modern UI experience far less jarring than before. Don’t dig all the Live Tiles? Windows 8.1 even tosses several sizable bones to desktop aficionados. . , the vast majority of computers found in the wild don’t rock the touchscreens that really take advantage of the modern UI. Microsoft seemed to forget that point with the original Windows 8 release, but fortunately the Windows 8.1 preview packs a bevy of improvements that make using it much more palatable to keyboard jockeys.
Get ready, PC gamers—change is coming. With major upgrades looming for both the platforms, developers will no longer have to throttle game performance to stay in step with aging console hardware. That means better games for everyone, including the PC gamers who have always been free to upgrade their hardware at will. One area where you’ll hear—not see—significant progress is game audio. And that matters more than you might realize. The Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 took surround sound mainstream. Aural fidelity in games is at an all-time high, and now that games have matured, audio teams are finally getting the attention and respect they deserve from audiences and from game developers. “We’ve seen through scientific research that audio can actually improve somebody’s perception of the video quality,” says Spencer Hooks, senior manager for games at Dolby. “Try playing a game with the sound turned off. The first thing you notice is, the screen is only displaying 30 to 40 degrees in front of you,” says DICE’s Ben Minto, audio director for Battlefield 4. “If someone sneaks up behind you, you’re not going to figure that out.” Without audio, you lose half of the game experience straight away.
A group of 26 U.S. senators, cutting across party lines, seek “public answers” on whether the National Security Agency collected bulk data in the U.S. other than phone records--including credit card purchases and financial information. The senators want the information for a public debate on the surveillance controversy, and have in a letter to Director of National Intelligence, James R. Clapper, also asked how long the NSA has used the Patriot Act to engage in bulk collection of records of people in the U.S., and whether the information includes cell-site location data. The NSA has been to collect phone metadata of a large number of customers of Verizon, according to a report in the Guardian last month. The information was said to have been leaked by a former NSA contractor, Edward Snowden, who also passed on documents that suggested that the NSA had real-time access to the content on servers of Internet companies like Facebook and Google. Beyond collecting telephony metadata such as telephone numbers dialed and length of calls, the program under which Verizon data was collected does not allow the government to listen in on anyone’s phone calls, and the information acquired does not include the content of any communications or the identity of any subscriber, Clapper , while confirming the authenticity of the order.
Two malicious software programs that help each other stay on computers are proving difficult to remove. Hyun Choi of Microsoft’s Malware Protection Center, on Sunday. One of the malware programs, called Vobfus, was detected in September 2009. It is known as a downloader, or a program that downloads other pieces of code. Once Vobfus infects a computer, it downloads from a remote command-and-control server a program called Beebone, which is another kind of downloader that installs other malicious programs on a computer. The two work together, downloading variants of the other that are not immediately detected by antivirus products, Choi wrote.
Nokia will buy Siemens’ 50 percent stake in joint venture Nokia Siemens Networks, which will become a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Finnish company after the transaction is completed. The handset maker is paying €1.7 billion (US$2.2 billion) to acquire the stake in the mobile networks equipment company. The Siemens name will be phased out, and a new name and brand will be announced at the closing of the transaction expected by the third quarter of this year. The acquisition has been approved by the boards of both Siemens and Nokia, and is subject to customary regulatory approvals. Nokia said it will support the current management plan for Nokia Siemens Networks, including a restructuring plan already in progress. The current management and governance structure will stay in place, with Rajeev Suri continuing as CEO and Jesper Ovesen as executive chairman of the board of directors.
Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) that use social media are 56 percent more likely to increase their revenue, according to a recent report by research analysts at several organizations. Around 28 percent of SMEs that were reported a revenue increase, compared to 18 percent of all businesses, according to the MYOB Business Monitor, released by the market research firm MYOB. A ) Research found 20 percent of SMEs use social media for business purposes, with Gen Y the most prolific users (22 percent), followed by Gen X (22 percent), Baby Boomers (18 percent) and 65-plus (9 percent).
The suspected China-based hackers known as the "Comment Crew" are back at it again, a development likely to contribute to continued tensions between the U.S. and China over cyberattacks. The security community has had the group under its watch for a number of years, but in February, its activity was exhaustively detailed from computer security vendor Mandiant. Mandiant's report said a specific The Comment Crew laid low for a while following the report but is back hacking again, said Alex Lanstein, senior researcher for FireEye.
Hewlett-Packard CEO Meg Whitman stressed as HP tried to win Chinese business customers at an event in Beijing last week. "Believe me, HP is here to stay," Whitman said in a keynote at the HP World Tour in Beijing. "We've come a long way since I joined Hewlett Packard 20 months ago." HP has made the rapidly-growing Chinese market a strong international focus. Whitman and other HP officials took their case directly to Chinese businesses at a two-day event, which for businesses focused on . The speech marked Whitman's third trip to China. She said she has spoken to 525 Chinese customers and 225 partners in the last year.
A moderately busy small or home office is the target audience for the Canon Pixma MX922, a $200 (as of 06/28/2013) color inkjet multifunction that can handle every office chore from automatic two-sided scanning and printing, to faxing and printing optical media. Output quality and speed are good, too. But the party ends with the inks, which come in many sizes, but none of them great bargains. The Canon Pixma MX922 is a well-rounded multifunction inkjet printer, literally as well as feature-wise. It has Canon's signature rounded corners, a beveled top and bottom, and the same wrap-around front panel and small flip-open ink access lid as its cousin. However, it retains Canon's dodgy, last-generation controls, with the three action buttons and separate four-way cursor. The issue with these is that some functions are available only via the action buttons, and some only via the contextually lit cursor/okay buttons. It's confusing, inefficient, and—if you use the panel often enough—aggravating. On the plus side, the button grid transforms into a keypad when you need to use the unit's fax capabilities. Installing is MX922 is easy, if a wee bit tedious. There are quite a few dialogs to click through, but the install routine found the printer on the network quickly and there were no other glitches. We used Wi-Fi, but you may also connect directly to a PC via the unit's USB 2.0 port, or wire it to your network via ethernet. The software is the usual efficient Canon bundle, with its veteran scanning utility, Image Garden for organizing and editing photos, and a solid driver. There are also the usual remote and email printing features. As mentioned, the MX922 automatically prints and scans in duplex. Paper capacity is good for a small office multifunction: 250 sheets, which reside in a bottom-mounted cassette that extends to handle legal-sized paper. Directly above the cassette and revealed when the front panel drops are a 20-sheet tray for 4-by-6-inch photo media and a feed for printable optical media. As with most Canon printers, the front panel drops automatically, so you can keep it closed for appearances yet not have to worry about a paper catastrophe if you print without checking the machine first.
The 2013 US Search Awards are now accepting nominations from organizations, agencies and individuals for search campaigns conducted in the US. The awards include 22 different categories, along with a Grand Prix prize which will be awarded to the best entry among the 22 categories. The deadline for...
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the Web. From Search Engine Land: New Bing Search By License Feature Filters Images Based On Usage Rights Bing announced a new “Search by License” feature today that filters images...
Bing announced a new “Search by License” feature today that filters images based on usage rights. The new feature filters images with a Creative Commons license, helping users avoid the hassle of digging through image licensing details to find available photos. The “Search by...
Google has added more granularity to impression share reporting in AdWords. Already available at the campaign and ad group level, search impression share data is now available at the keyword level. You’ll find search impression share, search exact match impression share and search lost...
The amount you make at your job is heavily dependent on two factors: value and scarcity. By value, I mean how much you are contributing (usually financially, but not always) to a company. By scarcity, I am referring to how many people can or will do your exact job. Investment bankers make a lot of...
Warren “Ted” Ulle, also known in the SEO community for his handle “Tedster,” passed away with his family at his side Thursday night, June 27, 2013. Many of us in the SEO industry learned an incredible amount of knowledge from Ted over the years. In all honesty, his work and...
Google has a PR problem. No, I don’t mean PageRank. I’m talking about the original definition of PR – Public Relations. And, it’s maybe less Public Relations than it is Webmaster Relations. You see, Google hasn’t done a good job of balancing content about problems with content about successes...
Shared knowledge, experiences, vocabulary… they’re all part of building an effective internet marketing team. And Search Marketing Expo – SMX East is an exceptional opportunity for teams to learn and network. Choose from more than 50 sessions on the SMX East agenda covering topics including search...
Today’s Google logo marks the commencement of the 100th edition of the Tour de France. Covering a total of 3,404 kilometers (2,115.15 miles), the multi-stage bicycle race runs from Saturday June 29 through Sunday July 21. The 22 teams competing in the 2013 Tour de France are comprised of nine...