Die US-Regierung hat sich gegen den Antrag von Technologie-Riesen wie Google gestellt, mehr Informationen über deren Zusammenarbeit mit den Geheimdiensten zu veröffentlichen. Solche Angaben wären "für unsere Feinde unbezahlbar", hiess es in einer Stellungnahme des Justizministeriums für das zuständige Geheimgericht.
Twitter drückt bei seinem geplanten Börsengang aufs Tempo. Investoren seien von Goldman Sachs aufgefordert worden, ihr Einverständnis zur Haltefrist von 180 Tagen für die neuen Aktien kurzfristig bis Mittwochnachmittag abzugeben, erfuhr Reuters von zwei der angeschriebenen Investoren.
Google hat für die nächste Version seines Chrome-Browsers eine neue Funktion für die Bildsuche angekündigt. Klickt der Nutzer mit der rechten Maustaste auf ein Foto, erhält er im Kontextmenü die Auswahloption, das Netz direkt nach ähnlichen Bildern zu durchsuchen, wie das Unternehmen mitteilt. Darüber hinaus sind 50 Sicherheitslücken in dem neuen Browser mit der Versionsnummer 30 geschlossen worden.
Nachdem die Übernahme der niederländischen KPN durch America Movil kürzlich wieder Schwung bekommen hatte, scheint es nun die nächsten Probleme zu geben. Offenbar werden sich die beiden Unternehmen hinsichtlich des Preises für die Übernahme nicht einig, wie der US-Nachrichtendienst Bloomberg berichtet.
Gute Nachrichten für den taiwanischen Auftragshersteller Foxconn: Offenbar konnte das Unternehmen mehrere Aufträge aus Indonesien gewinnen. Es handelt sich dabei um Orders für Mobilfunkgeräte von einem indonesischen Distributor. Insgesamt gehe es bei den Aufträgen um rund 50 Millionen Mobilfunkgeräte, die sowohl Feature Phones als auch Smartphones umfassen.
Apple hat nach über eineinhalb Jahren seine Push-Mail-Dienste in Deutschland wieder eingeschaltet. Der iPhone-Konzern bestätigte dies in einer Kundennotiz. Zuvor hatte Apple vor dem Oberlandesgericht Karlsruhe die Umsetzung eines von Motorola erwirkten Verbots stoppen können.
Die Geheimdokumente des Informanten Edward Snowden halten laut seinem Vertrauten Glenn Greenwald noch viele Überraschungen bereit. Ein Grossteil der wichtigen Unterlagen müsse noch veröffentlicht werden, erklärte der Enthüllungsjournalist des britischen „Guardian“. Zugleich bekräftigte er, dass die Dateien gut geschützt seien.
Der iranische Präsident Hassan Rohani hat eine Lockerung der Internet-Blockade in seinem Land in Aussicht gestellt. Er setze sich dafür ein, dass das Volk im Iran ein Recht auf bequemen Zugang zu allen Informationen weltweit bekomme, schrieb Ruhani über den Kurzmitteilungsdienst Twitter.
Der dänische Unterhaltungselektronikkonzern Bang & Olufsen (B&O) rutscht immer weiter in die Verlustzone. Der Rivale des insolventen deutschen Unternehmens Loewe erwirtschaftete im ersten Quartal ein Defizit von gut neun Mio. Euro nach einem Minus von 8,6 Mio. Euro im Vorjahreszeitraum, wie der Luxushersteller heute mitteilte. Der Umsatz schrumpfte auf rund 75 Mio. Euro.
Auf der Hightech-Messe Ceatec haben der Festplatten-Hersteller Seagate Technology und der japanische Konzern TDK eine Technologie demonstriert, mit der sich die bisherigen Grenzen der magnetischen Datenaufzeichnung überwinden lassen.
You'd still have to put your tray table up.
A Microsoft without Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer? Unimaginable. Unthinkable. But ultimately undeniable. named him as the top candidate may indicate that Microsoft’s board is looking both outside the company, and for entirely fresh perspectives. that three of the top investors in Microsoft want company founder and current chairman Bill Gates to step down as well. The report says the three rebel shareholders hold more than 5 percent of the company’s outstanding shares—that’s slightly more than the 4.5 percent stake Gates still holds. Microsoft, naturally, hasn’t commented. Gates, who once controlled 49 percent of the company, has steadily sold off millions of shares per year on a pre-set plan that will see him pull out of the company (financially at least) by 2018. Gates shouldn't leave immediately. In fact, he's the key to ensuring a successful transition between Ballmer and the new chief executive. "Bill is involved in the search for a new CEO, and I believe he’ll stay put to ensure that the company’s direction is clear and on a solid footing as the new CEO takes over," Wes Miller, an analyst with Directions on Microsoft, said in an email.
Oracle has fired back against charges by a shareholder advisory group that CEO Larry Ellison’s compensation is excessive given the company’s performance and when compared to other tech company CEOs. Ellison receives a $1 salary, taking the remainder of his pay as stock options. In Oracle’s past fiscal year, Ellison took home $76.9 million but declined to take a bonus. Last week, CtW Investment Group to Oracle compensation committee chairman Bruce Chizen, criticizing Oracle’s “top-heavy” executive compensation practices and saying Ellison’s pay “far outstrips” his peers. CtW represents union pension funds that are “substantial” Oracle shareholders. Oracle general counsel and secretary Dorian Daley responded to CtW in a with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Wednesday.
Tech misconceptions you've given up correcting, the rise of laziness in tech, Samsung's big week, Valve's Steam machines, and other steam machines.
Steam's Early Access has encouraged a slew of developers to take the beta-release route for quick cash. This may not be the best idea.
Massive data collection and surveillance programs at the National Security Agency are necessary to keep the nation safe from terrorism, several senators said Wednesday. While some members of the Senate Judiciary Committee called for changes in NSA surveillance programs that would end the bulk collection of U.S. telephone records, others defended the program and a second surveillance program focused on email communications of people outside the U.S. Ending the collection of telephone metadata in the U.S. would make the U.S. more vulnerable to a 9/11-style terrorist attack, said Senator Dianne Feinstein, a California Democrat and chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. The NSA’s collection of U.S. telephone call information is legal and necessary, she said at a Judiciary Committee hearing. “Our great strength today, ladies and gentlemen, in protecting this homeland is to be able to have the kind of technology that’s able to piece together data while protecting rights,” Feinstein said. “I will do everything I can to prevent this program from being cancelled out.”
” since January 2011. The Silk Road functioned as a sort of Ebay for drugs and other oft-illegal merchandise, serving as an anonymous marketplace connecting buyers with sellers, complete with an escrow system to reduce transactional risk. . The site also relied on Bitcoins to allow buyers and sellers to swap cash without revealing their identity. The Silk Road currently prompts you to log in with your user ID before tossing up the seizure notification.
Dell sent a message that it intends to keep its PC division alive with the launch of new Venue tablets on Wednesday. The . The tablets will come with screen sizes ranging from 7 inches to 11 inches. All the tablets will be available in November. The include the Dell Venue 7, which will have a 7-inch screen, and the Venue 8, which will have an 8-inch screen. The Venue 7 will be priced at $149, and the Venue 8 will be priced at $179.
that runs in the browser. Hover! was originally bundled with Windows 95, and puts players in the seat of a hovercraft on a 3D map. The goal is to collect three flags scattered around the map before your computer-controlled opponents do, avoiding obstacles using powerups to get an edge. —is a modern facelift with futuristic graphics and multiple hovercraft to choose from. There’s also a private online multiplayer mode, which generates a link for up to eight players to join. .)
The U.S. Department of Justice has opposed requests by Facebook, Google, Microsoft and other companies to publish the number of surveillance requests they receive from the National Security Agency and other agencies. Requests from five Internet companies, also including Yahoo and LinkedIn, would hurt the NSA’s ability to conduct surveillance on “particular” Internet communications, filed with the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court on Monday. If Internet communications providers publish statistics about surveillance requests, that information could drive terrorists to other providers, the DOJ said. “Releasing information that could induce adversaries to shift communications platforms in order to avoid surveillance would cause serious harm to the national security interests of the United States,” DOJ lawyers wrote in the brief. The U.S. intelligence community would not object to a release of the total number of surveillance requests made per year, not divided up by company, said James Clapper, U.S. director of national intelligence, speaking at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing Wednesday. But identifying the surveillance requests by company would allow terrorists to go “shopping around for providers that aren’t covered” by U.S. surveillance efforts, he said.
Facebook knows when you've downloaded an app. Now it want you to use the app.
To inject variety, volume and quality into health applications, Box has teamed up with Dignity Health and The Social+Capital Partnership on a developer contest. The competing apps must be built for the Box platform and help doctors and hospitals improve the way they communicate with and educate patients, Box said on Wednesday. Participants can now. They will get access to developer tools and services from Twilio, Tokbox, Parse and Firebase. Developers have until January 10, 2014 to submit their apps for consideration. The first-place winner gets a $100,000 convertible note, as well as mentorship and one month of office space from , a Palo Alto, Calif., venture capital firm.
Dell teased its Intel Bay Trail-powered 8-inch Venue Pro tablet at the Intel Developer Forum last month. On Wednesday, the company introduced several 11-inch versions of the Venue Pro. But don’t think Dell is buying into the notion of a post-PC marketplace: It also introduced three new Ultrabooks bearing its XPS brand, including an 11.6-inch, 2-in-1 convertible, and a 15.6-inch model tricked out with discrete graphics and an eye-popping display with a resolution of 3200 by 1800 pixels. on those devices). in early 2013). Hey, why waste a perfectly good brand name? Hand briefly showed the Venue 8 Pro during one of the IDF keynotes, but he revealed few details about the tablet at that time. Today, the company announced that the Venue 8 Pro will feature an 8-inch IPS display with ten touch points and a resolution of 1280 by 800 pixels. It’s powered by Intel’s quad-core Atom Z3740D processor (Bay Trail family) and 2GB of single-channel DDR3/1600 memory. It has 32GB of flash storage, which can be expanded up to 96GB via a MicroSD card reader (a model with 64GB of storage that can be expanded to 128GB will also be available).
Dude you're getting a Dell Android tablet.
Have no place in your digital life for yet another social network? You can clear away your Google+ account in just a few clicks.
Agribusiness giant Monsanto is paying $930 million to acquire the Climate Corporation, maker of a software platform that crunches weather-related data in order to help farmers more effectively grow crops. "Everyone benefits when farmers are able to produce more with fewer resources," Monsanto CEO Hugh Grant said in a statement released Wednesday. Founded in 2006, the Climate Corporation has built a platform that pulls together "hyper-local weather monitoring, agronomic data modeling, and high-resolution weather simulations," according to a statement. The goal is to give farm operators the information they need to choose the right insurance coverage to protect their profits against the advent of bad weather. The Climate Corporation itself offers
With its new "My Cloud" connected hard drive, Western Digital wants to help you bring the power of the cloud home. As its name suggests, My Cloud lets you access your files from anywhere you can find an Internet connection. But unlike Dropbox or SkyDrive—where your data exists on servers at some unspecified location—My Cloud sits in your home or office. Beyond merely storing files, My Cloud also acts as a digital entertainment hub capable of streaming content to any DLNA-certified device. You can also use My Cloud to back-up PCs using WD’s built-in back-up solution for Windows, WD SmartWare. For Mac users, My Cloud is compatible with Apple’s Time Machine utility. When you need remote access to files stored on My Cloud, WD provides apps for Android and iOS for easy access. The apps also come with integration for Dropbox, Google Drive, and SkyDrive to transfer files between a My Cloud device and popular cloud storage services, and you can use the apps to upload mobile files (read: photos and videos) directly to your My Cloud drive. external hard drive, My Cloud features a USB 3.0 expansion port—though it’s not clear if My Cloud will work with non-WD external drives. My Cloud stands 6.7 inches tall and is 1.90 inches wide, with a depth of 5.50 inches.
For professional looking design, Adobe Creative Suite products such as InDesign, Illustrator, and Photoshop are feature-rich tools you can use to create stunning projects. But using them isn’t cheap. Creative Cloud, which gives you Web access to these software offerings is $50 a month, and even if you only need InDesign you’ll have to shell out $20 a month. And most people can’t just pick these programs up and start cranking out beautiful creative—there can be a steep learning curve in using them. , a Web-based, drag-and-drop design app, launched today in beta as a simple-to-use alternative to some of these costly and more complex offerings. It includes 75 templates for creating paper or digital newsletters, brochures, annual reports and the like. The interface is easy enough to figure out, and in a few clicks you can have a new creation started, plug in copy, and drag and drop modules to customize layout. Lucidpress includes collaboration features so you can share a document with team members, who can respond in a chat window alongside the editing pane. While you can use the platform to create printed campaigns, it’s integrated with Google Drive, Dropbox, Flickr, YouTube and Facebook so you can pull text, photos and videos from them for use on a digital campaign optimized for viewing on mobile devices, as well.
If you purchased a new laptop recently, especially an Ultrabook, you may have noticed a certain dearth of USB ports. Indeed, my Samsung Series 9 has just two of them. Two! A mouse here and an external hard drive there, and bam, no more ports. Fortunately, it's a simple matter to add extras. In fact, you can daisy-chain something like 67 million USB ports off of just one, so your expansion options are fairly endless. And if you've shopped around, you've no doubt seen USB hubs in all shapes, sizes, and prices. How do you know what kind to buy? hub. That'll cost you a bit more, and add the hassles of an extra cord snaking across your desk and an extra device to keep plugged in, but it's worth it.
Pity the glass on the front of your smartphone. It typically gets subjected to a lot of abuse through its life and sometimes even shatters if the forces are too much. But glass manufacturers are continually pushing the boundaries of what's possible with the material, and some of the latest gadget glass is on show this week by Nippon Electric Glass at the Ceatec 2013 expo. Among the more impressive demonstrations, the company was showing off the impact resistance of its "T2X" chemically strengthened glass that's already used in smartphones and tablet PCs. Every 30 seconds throughout the show, a 500-gram steel ball was dropping from a height of about a meter onto a sheet of the glass about the size of a small TV screen. Every time the ball fell, it bounced off the front of the glass and the sheet appeared none the worse for the demonstration. Equally impressive was the company's G-Leaf glass, which is so thin and flexible that it is supplied on a roll to customers.
Microsoft is adding subscription pricing for apps in its Office Store, besides opening eight new store fronts. Developers will be allowed to charge a monthly recurring fee for their applications which they can promote and distribute globally or within the 31 individual selectable markets where the Office Store is available. The company said it was adding stores in Russia, China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, the Netherlands, Belgium, Italy and Brazil "starting this spring," besides supporting Chinese, Russian, Dutch, Brazilian Portuguese and Italian language apps. .
HTC and Qualcomm are reworking a radio chip for the HTC One smartphone in order to avoid a U.S. ban on imports of patent-infringing technology, according to a Wall Street Journal report. The U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC) made a preliminary ruling last week that Taiwan's HTC on two Nokia patents. The infringed patents cover a method for receiving and transmitting radio signals, and a method for eliminating unwanted signals. Because this preliminary ruling raises the chances of a ban on U.S. imports of infringing HTC products, HTC is working with chip manufacturer Qualcomm to alter the design of a component for its flagship One smartphone, according to the Wall Street Journal, citing anonymous sources. While only older HTC phones were listed in the case, HTC's One and other new devices also use the same technology that could be banned by the ITC, the paper reported. Neither HTC nor Qualcomm immediately responded to requests for comment.
Microsoft is now taking Windows 8.1 pre-orders, for those who just can't wait to part with their money. . Both pre-orders are for the full version, and they come on a DVD. are fairly basic, and if you're upgrading from Windows 7, your installed applications and files come along for the ride. Windows XP and Vista users won't be able to upgrade their machines directly to Windows 8.1, however; you'll have to first upgrade to Windows 8, then download Windows 8.1 as a free update to the base operating system, as silly as that is. (Isn't there some way to automate the process?) Windows 8.1 is a fairly significant upgrade for Microsoft's polarizing, touch-friendly operating system. Microsoft has made several concessions to desktop users, including a boot to desktop option, a way to disable modern-style “hot corners,” and a Start button that you can right-click on to reveal a list of desktop functions.
A Japanese start-up says it has finessed a technology that could finally make consumer-grade fuel cells a reality. If successful, the company, Aquafairy, would create a business where many much larger companies have failed.
A South Korean company has developed a smartphone and camera combo that it claims brings to any car some driving safety features typically found in only high-end automobiles.
Yahoo has asked that it be allowed to review declassified documents of a secret court about a dispute over data collection between the Internet company and the government, as the release of the redacted documents could mislead the public. The company had asked the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in July to order the public release of a secret order in a 2008 surveillance dispute, as it would demonstrate that the Internet company "objected strenuously" to government directives. Former National Security Agency contractor, Edward Snowden, disclosed through newspaper reports that Internet companies provided real-time access to content on their servers to the NSA under a surveillance program called Prism. The Internet companies denied the charge. Most data requests are in the form of "gag orders," which prohibit the recipients of orders from discussing them in public.
It might not be immediately obvious, but with every solar panel installed comes a simple but essential piece of maintenance: regular cleaning.
Pioneer updated its line of HUDs (heads-up displays), and it hopes the in-car gadgets will help keep drivers' eyes on the road instead of on a GPS device or other electronics.
Ford President and CEO Alan Mulally, considered a front-runner among candidates to replace Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, has reportedly tried to put the brakes on the accelerating rumors. he loves "serving Ford" and that he has "nothing new to add" to his plans to continue working at the automotive company. The 68-year-old executive, who was also president and CEO of Boeing Commercial Airplanes, has emerged in the past week as a top choice to take over from Ballmer among search committee members, according to media reports based on anonymous sources. that Mulally had "vaulted to the forefront" among candidates due to his successful stints at Ford and Boeing, his reputation as a turnaround expert and his ties to Microsoft, which include being a close advisor to Ballmer, and to Seattle, where he has a home.
The U.S. National Security Agency's reported efforts to weaken encryption standards have prompted an encrypted communications company to move away from cryptographic algorithms sanctioned by the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Silent Circle, a provider of encrypted mobile Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) and text messaging apps and services, will stop using the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) cipher and Secure Hash Algorithm 2 (SHA-2) hash functions as default cryptographic algorithms in its products. . "We are going to replace our use of the SHA-2 hash functions with the Skein hash function. We are also examining using the Threefish cipher where that makes sense." The company also plans to stop using P-384, one of the elliptic curves recommended by the NIST for use in elliptic curve cryptography (ECC).