Die Computer-Branche schwächelt: Im zweiten Quartal 2013 sanken die Umsätze, die durch den Verkauf von Servern erwirtschaftet wurden, um 6,2 Prozent gegenüber dem Vorjahr.
Der japanische Spielespezialist Nintendo will mit einer günstigen mobilen Konsole den Smartphone-Games Paroli bieten. Das neue Gerät mit dem Namen 2DS ist dabei erstmals seit Jahren nicht mehr klappbar, sondern flach.
Grosse Tablets setzen sich offenbar nicht durch: Samsung hat die Bauteile-Bestellungen für 10,1 Zoll grosse Tablets deutlich zurückgefahren. Gegen kleinere Modelle scheinen die Geräte nicht anzukommen.
Der Zürcher Internet Service Provider (ISP) iWay hat mit Sync&Share eine Alternative zu bestehenden Cloud-Backup-Lösungen angekündigt. Die gesicherten Daten werden dabei in Schweizer Rechenzentren gespeichert und geschützt, teilen die Limatstädter mit.
Samsung wird seine neue Computeruhr „Galaxy Gear“ am kommenden Mittwoch in Berlin im Rahmen der IFA erstmals vorstellen. Das bestätigte das Unternehmen heute gegenüber der Nachrichtenagentur DPA. Samsung liefert derzeit Apple ein Rennen, wer als erster in den neuen Markt der Computeruhren vordringen wird.
Die Stiftung Switch will künftig das Projekt Neptun als Sponsoring-Partner unterstützen. "Neptun" ermöglicht Studium und Arbeit unabhängig von Ort und Zeit. Es steht sowohl Studierenden wie auch allen Angehörigen der Schweizer Hochschulgemeinschaft offen. Über Neptun können diese günstig qualitativ hochwertige Hard- und Software beziehen.
Das deutsche Startup Ao Terra will in Zukunft Privathäuser mit der Abwärme von Servern beheizen. Für die Idee, auf die man laut Mitgründer René Marcel Schertzmann schon viel früher hätte kommen können, hat das Startup als erstes deutsches Unternehmen eine Million Euro via Crowdfunding gesammelt.
Die Partei von Wikileaks-Gründer Julian Assange ist wenige Wochen nach der Gründung und kurz vor den Parlamentswahlen am 7. September in seiner Heimat Australien zerstritten. Sechs prominente Mitglieder haben der Partei bereits den Rücken gekehrt.
Mit Erhan Bayir als Key Account Manager hat Kobil Schweiz ab sofort einen neuen Verantwortlichen für die hiesigen Verkaufsaktivitäten der IT-Security-Spezialistin. Country Manager Oskar Reimann kümmere sich künftig um die Banken- und Bestandskunden, lässt das Unternehmen wissen.
Vom 22. bis 23. Oktober geht in Zürich Oerlikon die nunmehr siebte Ausgabe der internationalen Entwicklerkonferenz Jazoon über die Bühne. Ein wesentlicher Teil des Programms ist bereits online und wird laufend weiter ergänzt.
Might and Delight’s Shelter is a sublime badger-herding experience.
The Tor anonymity network is enjoying a massive uptick in popularity after two significant privacy-minded events took place earlier this month , two secure email providers that voluntarily closed their doors on Thursday, August 8, rather than allow the U.S. government access to their users’ messages. , a web browser that allows users to hop onto the Tor network in order to circumvent government firewalls to access torrent sites and other banned parts of the Web. ) since. Tor now regularly sees more than twice as many daily users as it did before the email shutdowns and the PirateBrowser’s release.
Following through on a policy change announced in 2012, IBM has started restricting availability of hardware patches to paying customers, spurring at least one advocacy group to accuse the company of anticompetitive practices. IBM “is getting to the spot where the customer has no choice but to buy an IBM maintenance agreement, or lose access to patches and changes,” said Gay Gordon-Byrne, executive director of the Digital Right to Repair (), a coalition for championing the rights of digital equipment owners. Such a practice could dampen the market for support service of IBM equipment from non-IBM contractors, and could diminish the resale value of IBM equipment, DRTR charged. On Aug. 11, IBM began requiring visitors of the website to provide a serial number in order to download a patch or update. According to DRTR, IBM uses the serial number to check to see if the machine being repaired was under a current IBM maintenance contract, or under an IBM hardware warranty.
Following conversations on Twitter just got easier with a new iOS, Android, and desktop update.
There are two ways to evaluate the Razer Tartarus, Razer’s new gaming keypad. The first is as a piece of high-end gaming hardware for its own sake, and that’s where the Tartarus excels; it’s a well-made piece of hardware that feels good in your hand, especially when you adjust the palmrest to fit your needs. The Tartarus' 25 keys are all programmable using Razer’s Synapse software. Sure, Razer’s cheating a little bit here by counting the keypad's eight-way thumbpad as 8 separate buttons, but you can map command functions to each of the eight directions pretty easily so we’ll let it slide. It’s also highly portable and quick to set up, making it ideal for professional gamers or anyone who finds themselves moving between machines a lot. The second way to evaluate the Tartarus is as a piece of gaming hardware somebody might choose to buy, and from that perspective it seems a bit pointless. I’m not entirely certain who would actually benefit significantly from learning to use the Tartarus. , for instance. However, that initial time investment usually pays off with a big performance improvement once you’ve adjusted. The problem with the Tartarus is that even after you take the time to adjust to using it, I’m not convinced you see a meaningful benefit. Even when used to maximum effect, the Tartarus is still half a keyboard.
Twitter is updating its site and mobile apps to make it easier for users to carry out conversations on the site and share them with others outside of Twitter.
A powerful Delta IV Heavy rocket launched a classified reconnaissance satellite into space from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California Wednesday. The launch took place under clear skies at 11:03 a.m. PT and everything appeared to be going to plan up to the point at which the second stage of the rocket ignited six minutes into the flight. At that point, TV coverage was ended at the request of the U.S. National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), which will operate the satellite. No details on the satellite have been released except that it will be operated by the NRO. The office is charged with providing “innovative overhead intelligence systems for national security,” in other words: spy satellites. That’s one of the clues to the satellite likely being the newest member of the NRO’s Keyhole spy satellite network.
What do bitcoin, emoji, and selfies have in common? They're all now official words, at least according to the Oxford dictionary.
Think you know who will replace Steve Ballmer as Microsoft’s new CEO? Put your money where your mouth is. . The current favorite? Steven Elop of Nokia, who is topping the charts at 5-to-1 odds. to lead the company, comes in at the middle of the pack at 20-to-1. Who’s the smart money betting on? A raft of Microsoft insiders, according to Ladbrokes. Topping the charts is Elop, who left Microsoft to run Nokia and has since forged strong ties with Microsoft and Windows Phone. But right behind Elop is current Microsoft chief operating officer Kevin Turner and the man credited (or not) with Windows 8, current venture capitalist Steven Sinofsky. Turner and Sinofsky are listed as 6-to-1 and 8-to-1, respectively.
Copying music from your iOS device to your PC is not as easy as it should be, thanks to the limitations of iTunes. Neither is it made much easier with iPod Copy Master, a $20 application that promises to streamline the task. Fortunately, its rivals do a better job. iPod Copy Master sounds promising, as it offers to transfer 1,000 songs from your iPod, iPhone, or iPad to your PC in less than 30 minutes, and touts its ability to copy playlists and ratings back to your PC, too. But you'll have to hand over $20 to access any of those features, as the free version is so limited as to be almost useless. It allows you to copy only one track from your iPod to your PC, and not just one track at a time—one track only. iPod Copy Master also sports a design that looks as though it's supposed to resemble wood, but comes no closer to real wood than those station wagons with faux-wood panels on the side that you used to see back in the 1980s. You can change the skin, but the only other option in the free version sports a black background with white text, which quickly irritated my eyes. And, really, even a more appealing color scheme can't help iPod Copy Master. This application has the basics covered, as it easily detects an attached iOS device, and quickly pulls up its contents on your PC's screen. And I like that you can choose between transferring the music only to a folder on your desktop or doing that and syncing with iTunes. But that's about it.
The new handheld system is $40 cheaper than the Nintendo 3DS, and it plays all the same games, albeit without a 3D screen.
. ” [PDF], security pros Dhiru Kholia and Przemysław Wegrzyn outline in painstaking detail the steps they took to successfully decode the program that makes up the Dropbox user client, essentially opening it (and their would-be victims’ accounts) up for direct attack. Reverse engineering is not a malicious attack, per se, but is rather a long-standing technique used to take a peek under the hood of any high-tech product, typically a piece of hardware. Reverse engineering of software has become more popular in recent years, as well, with original developers and reverse engineers continually one-upping each other in an attempt to protect their code or to expose it, respectively. . These techniques are used when a developer doesn’t want to open his code base for analysis, review, attack, or (more to the point) outright copying by others. (This is the antithesis of open source programming.)
Infor has unveiled a new version of Inforce, a product that connects Salesforce.com’s popular cloud-based CRM (customer relationship management) software with its own. Inforce,, is built on top of Salesforce.com’s Force.com development platform and exchanges data between Salesforce.com and Infor ERP software. New features include support for tying multiple systems and companies to a single Inforce instance, according to the announcement Wednesday. Inforce also expands support for Business Object Documents, XML-based messages that Infor’s ION integration framework uses to move information between applications, rather than use “clumsy point-to-point database integrations,” according to a data sheet.
The jam-packed VMworld show this week in San Francisco has been VMware’s launchpad for flights deeper into storage, an area that the company thinks is due for more virtualization. While VMware’s new NSX network hypervisor has sent shockwaves through that industry, the company is also introducing or teasing products that bring some new ideas to storage. The idea is the same in both cases: Let enterprises pool their IT resources and apply them to applications and VMs (virtual machines) as needed. The highlights include software to pool server-based storage into a shared resource and a tool to bring external storage into the age of VMs. Across both, VMware is introducing policy-based control that’s designed to let enterprises fine-tune their allocation of storage to specific VMs and applications. Storage virtualization is an industry trend that could affect how enterprises deal with data, Gartner analyst Chris Wolf said. In addition to VMware’s latest strides, Microsoft is doing similar things with its Storage Spaces technology, he said.
Foursquare delivered a version of its social networking app for Microsoft’s Windows 8 on Wednesday, focusing more on local discovery than actually checking in and meeting friends. For Foursquare, the app allows the company to continue pushing away from its roots as a way to alert friends of your location, and as an avenue to discover what’s going on around you. For Microsoft, however, the app is a validation of a promise it made at its Build conference this summer, when it said that a would land on Windows 8. Foursquare is the first, although apps like Facebook are probably more eagerly anticipated. In keeping with the Windows 8 design style, however, the Foursquare app appears to offer a bright, interactive way to find local events and places to eat nearby. (The is currently rolling out, Microsoft said—I wasn’t able to download it from my work account at press time.) ”Discovery is a huge part of why I am really excited about Foursquare for Windows 8,” Microsoft chief blogger Brandon LeBlanc wrote in a . “With Foursquare, I regularly find all kinds of new places to visit—whether it’s a new restaurant try or some new local attraction (such as a state park or museum).”
Why buy a 3D Blu-ray player to watch movies on your TV when you can just stream them instead?
The New York Times, Twitter, and other yesterday in an attack by the Syrian Electronic Army (SEA). While there is certainly a political motivation to the hacks, there is an underlying lesson that all businesses should learn. Apparently, the latest attack was the result of sites being redirected at the DNS server level. AlienVault Labs has posted a pointing to the Syrian Electronic Army server as of last night. The WhoIs data for the New York Times domain showed the SEA listed as the admin for the domain, and the name server entries were modified to redirect to the SEA. The Syrian Electronic Army was also reportedly behind recent attacks on The Washington Post. The recent attacks by the SEA have a common thread, and recognizing it is the first step to defending against future attacks. Darien Kindlund, 's manager of threat intelligence, says the attacks aren’t coming through the front door and attacking the sites directly. Instead, they’re going after the low-hanging fruit—exploiting weaknesses in third-party affiliates. “With the Washington Post, a third-party advertiser platform was hacked," he says. "With the New York Times, the SEA went after the hosting provider.”
In the past 24 hours, the New York Times went down and Twitter images went wonky, while the Huffington Post dodged a digital bullet. All the chaos comes courtesy of the Syrian Electronic Army, a hacker group in love with Syrian president Bashar al-Assad—and this isn't the first time the cyber boogeymen have lashed out at Western targets. But what's all the hubbub about? Should you be worried about the Syrian Electronic Army? Is there a chance you and I could get caught in the crossfire, the way Lulzsec leaked so many passwords a few summers back? Read on to learn everything you need to know about the Syrian Electronic Army. Nobody knows for sure, but all indications suggest that is a group of pro-al-Assad hackers, rather than an official government group. The Syrian Electronic Army has been responsible for numerous high-profile hack attacks, including the hijacking of the Twitter accounts across the media spectrum—from venerable outlets like NPR, CBS, and the Associated Press all the way to BBC Weather, The Onion, and E! Online. Yesterday, the group claimed responsibility for the DNS-based troubles fouling the New York Times, Twitter, and the Huffington Post UK.
Now that 3D printing's becoming more popular, the rush to curtail copyright infringement begins.
Pirate Bay co-founder Gottfrid Svartholm Warg’s appeal of his conviction on charges of data intrusion, attempted aggravated fraud and aggravated fraud started on Wednesday, with arguments centering on the contention that other parties used the defendant’s computer by remote control. for hacking a mainframe belonging to Logica, now CGI, an IT firm that provided tax services to the Swedish government, and a mainframe used by Nordea bank. He was also convicted of fraud related to a number of attempted money transfers from accounts at Nordea, one of which was successful. The Pirate Bay co-founder has admitted hacking, but in his appeal is claiming that his computer was remotely controlled by other individuals, according to Charlotte Roos of the Swedish Court of Appeal. That is why Jacob Appelbaum, who is also the main advocate for the Tor anonymizing network, will be called as a witness, Roos said. “Appelbaum is going to explain to the Court that remote control is possible and how it can be done,” she said. Appelbaum is scheduled to appear in court on September 4.
Have you ever tried to cancel, say, your Pandora account? Then you know what a hassle it can be. First you have find the cancellation page, which isn’t exactly easy, then fill out an email form. This is standard practice with a lot of Web services, which work hard to get you signed up and are understandably reluctant to see you go. Though some make it easier than others to cancel an account, it can definitely be a time-consuming process. for hundreds of services, from Adobe to Zoho. And it color-codes each listing so you know at a glance whether it's easy, medium, hard, or even impossible to cancel. , which provides a brief overview of the requirements and/or policy for that service.
Nothing can replace watching a sports game at the local stadium—except for HD TVs, warm living rooms and nearby snacks. A recent ESPN poll found that 41 percent of fans would rather watch a game at home than at a stadium. “You have your own bathroom, the fridge is 10 feet away and the cost of a big-screen TV is less than it ever was,” says Fred Kirsch, publisher and VP of content at the New England Patriots football franchise. “Those are really hard to compete with.” But the Patriots are hoping to do just that by rolling out free Wi-Fi at Gillette Stadium this season to give fans a more connected experience at the team’s eight home games. NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell endorsed this idea in May, saying every NFL stadium should have high-speed Wi-Fi for its fans. The Patriots’ stadium used to rely on cellphone networks for mobile traffic, but that approach couldn’t handle the large number of photo uploads and status updates fans transmitted during games.
Compression software ZipItFree doesn't just make files smaller, it makes its interface smaller. This handy freebie lets you roll up its interface into its top bar, so you can minimize the screen space it occupies without closing it entirely. When you need ZipItFree again, you just click the button and the interface drops down again, just like a set of window blinds. It's a small design touch that proves quite useful. Unfortunately, the same thought didn't go into the software's default steel skin, which is not pleasing to the eye. Luckily, it's easy to change the design. I'd suggest either the Vista or Windows 7 design options, both of which make ZipItFree far easier on the eyes. , the ability to split up the file into multiple chunks of a set size for easier burning or emailing. For example, it can make an exact size to fit onto a 700MB CD disk or a 4GB DVD disk. You can also attach comments to an archive to remind yourself what's in it. ZipItFree performed very fast on my 30MBtest folder, coming close to its promised maximum 40 percent reduction and compressing the folder down to 20MB.
started with a targeted phishing attack against a reseller for Melbourne IT, an Australian domain registrar and IT services company. . This resulted in traffic to those Websites being temporarily redirected to a server under the attackers’ control. Hackers also made changes to the registration information for some of the targeted domains, including Twitter.com. However, Twitter.com itself was not impacted by the DNS hijacking attack.
But while you can create your own customized, off-contract Moto X phone, it's still tied to AT&T.
On the surface, Bitcoin seems to be a great way to hide cash. Actually, it’s a terrible way to launder money. that analyzed Bitcoin’s blockchain, or the public ledger that records bitcoin transactions. The ledger shows how bitcoins move from one person to another, represented by 34-character alphanumeric addresses. It’s a sea of numbers without names. But researchers from the University of California at San Diego and George Mason University found it is a lot harder to convert bitcoins to cash—or spend the bitcoins with a service—and stay anonymous due to the ledger. Most bitcoin users interact with a service to buy or sell the virtual currency. These days, most of those services want to know exactly who they’re dealing with, especially as regulators around the world take an increasing interest in bitcoin.
and other prominent Websites were struck by a powerful cyberattack that continued affecting other Websites into Tuesday evening, directing visitors to a site purportedly controlled by the Syrian Electronic Army (SEA). The attackers apparently struck an Australian IT services company, Melbourne IT, which provides domain name registration services. The pro-Syrian government SEA has recently conducted several high-profile attacks against media and other Websites. It appears that the hackers modified master DNS (Domain Name System) entries, allowing them to replace the correct IP addresses for Twitter.com and NYTimes.com with their own, said David Ulevitch, CEO and founder of the security company OpenDNS. OpenDNS monitors when domains are redirected, and it appeared the attack was continuing into the evening U.S. time, Ulevitch said.
The privacy campaign group Europe-v-Facebook said Wednesday it will ask the Irish High Court to review decisions made by the Irish Data Protection Commissioner not to investigate Facebook and the U.S. government surveillance program Prism. against European subsidiaries of major technology companies, claiming their data collection runs afoul of European privacy laws. revealing NSA surveillance programs. there are no grounds to start an investigation under the Irish Data Protection Act given that “safe harbor” requirements have been met, Europe-v-Facebook contends that it is violating European privacy laws by refusing to pursue the case.
A 110-core chip has been developed by Massachusetts Institute of Technology as it looks for power-efficient ways to boost performance in mobile devices, PCs and servers. The processor, called the Execution Migration Machine, tries to determine ways to reduce traffic inside chips, which enables faster and more power-efficient computing, said Mieszko Lis, a postgraduate student and Ph.D. candidate at MIT, during a presentation at the Hot Chips conference in California. The chip is a general purpose processor and not an accelerator like a graphics processor, Lis said, adding that it was an experimental chip. “It’s not the kind of thing you buy for Christmas,” Lis said.