In den USA hat der Kurznachrichtendienst Twitter bei der Beliebtheit unter Jugendlichen das soziale Netzwerk Facebook überholt. 26 Prozent der jungen Nutzer bezeichneten Twitter in einer Umfrage als beliebtestes Netzwerk, wie die Investmentbank Piper Jaffray mitteilte.
Google hat einem Zeitungsbericht zufolge riesige Gewinne in das Steuerparadies Bermudas verschoben. Insgesamt seien 8,8 Mrd. Euro Lizenzzahlungen auf die Bermudas geflossen. Das sei ein Viertel mehr als noch 2011, berichtet die „Financial Times“ am Freitag.
Der taiwanische Technologiezulieferer Foxconn hat Arbeitsrechtsverletzungen in einem Werk in China eingeräumt. Eine interne Untersuchung im Werk Yantai habe ergeben, dass die Unternehmensregeln zu Überstunden und Nachtarbeit in Einzelfällen nicht eingehalten worden seien, teilte Foxconn mit.
Die in Zürich absässige Firma Adello, die erst vor kurzem mit dem US-Startup HStreaming fusioniert hat, ist in den USA mit dem "CRN Emerging Vendor Award" ausgezeichnet worden. Damit darf sich das junge Unternehmen zu den "Big-Data-Topshots" zählen.
Die auf Telekommunikationslösungen für Bahngesellschaften spezialisierte Kapsch Carriercom übernimmt die deutsche ITM Group mit Sitz in Neuss bei Düsseldorf und einer Niederlassung in Wien. Die Deutschen bieten Dienstleistungen und Produkte für Daten- und Sprachkommunikation an und werden ab sofort als eigenständiges Unternehmen in die Kapsch-Gruppe integriert, teilte diese am Freitag mit. Kaufsumme wurde auf Anfrage keine genannt.
In seiner Zeit bei der CIA hat der US-Geheimdienstenthüller Edward Snowden einem Zeitungsbericht zufolge bereits 2009 das Misstrauen seines damaligen Vorgesetzten erregt. Der Abteilungsleiter habe einen entsprechenden Bericht über Snowden verfasst, der damals für die CIA in Genf gearbeitet hatte und vor einem Wechsel zur NSA stand, berichtete die „New York Times“ („NYT“) unter Berufung auf zwei hochrangige US-Vertreter.
Vor knapp einem Monat hat Apple seine beiden neuen iPhones der Weltöffentlichkeit präsentiert. Bereits nach dieser kurzen Zeit zeichnet sich ab, dass sich eines der Geräte deutlich geringerer Beliebtheit erfreut als das andere.
Wer Facebook nutzt, muss sich dessen bewusst sein, dass es keine wirklich privaten Accounts gibt. Und doch gibt es bisher zumindest die Möglichkeit, zu verhindern, dass Profile über die Suchfunktion des sozialen Netzwerks aufgespürt werden können. Allerdings nicht mehr lange.
Indien wird in den städtischen Regionen bis zum Ende des Jahres über 91 Mio. Social-Media-Nutzer zählen. Im Vergleich zum Juni 2013 entspricht das einem neuerlichem Wachstum um 17 Prozent, wie eine neue Analyse der Internet and Mobile Association of India in Zusammenarbeit mit IMRB International aufzeigt. Gründe für den weiter rasanten Anstieg sind die zunehmende Internetpenetration sowie günstige Smartphone-Tarife.
Die SBB kämpfen mit technischen Problemen. Dieses Mal ist die neue Softwareversion von Apple schuld. Zwei SBB-interne Apps, die Lokführer im Führerstand auf ihren iPads verwenden, sind mit iOS 7 nicht kompatibel.
The HP Chromebook 11 could have been just another low-cost container for Google’s browser-based OS. But Google stepped in to make it special—and maybe even spare it the mockery of PC snobs who Chromebook concept. Realistically, you can’t expect much from any sub-$300 machine, and most Chromebooks reside in this underwhelming hardware space. Nonetheless, Google’s 2012 partnership with Samsung on the a machine so high-end. And now we have HP’s Chromebook 11, a laptop that attempts to add some industrial design finesse to the low end of the Chromebook space. The Chromebook 11 offers none of the premium specs and design of the Pixel, and in terms of raw performance it’s not even better than Samsung’s Chromebook 3. Nevertheless, it shows that Google is committed to setting standards for Chrome hardware, and that it can deliver a high-quality experience at both premium and everyday prices.
If a cell phone can essentially see, hear, and detect movement like a person, shouldn’t it start to think like a person, too? That’s the basis of Qualcomm’s Zeroth processor, designed to emulate millions of the billions of neurons within the human brain. A version of the Zeroth has already been built into a robotic platform that learns by being encouraged—quite literally, “good robot”—rather than being traditionally programmed, Qualcomm executives said. For years, technologists have talked about personal assistants, pieces of code that pull in data and try to coalesce them into information that’s relevant and useful. Qualcomm’s Zeroth could form the hardware foundation upon which future personal assistants are built. ”Wouldn’t it be swell to have a device that you could train?” said M. Anthony Lewis, the senior director and the project engineer responsible for the Zeroth, in an interview. “It leads to the possibility of a customized user experience for each individual cellphone user, to be more like the phone that they want rather than the phone that they get.”
[Code] is an experimental game created by students at USC, and was probably my favorite discovery at the IndieCade conference last week in Los Angeles.
With the release of Windows 8.1 next week will come new tablets with Intel’s latest Atom chip code-named Bay Trail. The tablets, with starting prices from $299 to $350, include Dell’s Venue 8 Pro, Toshiba’s Encore, and Asustek’s Transformer Book T100. More models will ship in the coming months. The tablets are for web browsing and media consumption, much like the iPad, and offer more than eight hours of battery life with screen sizes starting at 8 inches. Accessories like keyboards can turn these devices into laptops, and the tablets will run existing Windows 7 and 8 applications. The new Windows 8.1 tablets are lighter and thinner than previous Windows 8 tablets that started shipping last year. An alternative to Bay Trail tablets will be Microsoft’s Surface 2, whose ARM processor is expected to be comparable or even better on battery life than Bay Trail tablets. The Bay Trail tablets should not be confused with the more expensive tablets like Surface Pro 2, which are considered PC replacements and run on Intel’s fourth-generation Core processors code-named Haswell. Those processors are faster but more power hungry.
Verizon. Please stop putting your logos over every square inch of our phones.
More details arrive regarding the next version of Android as well as for the Nexus 5.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers have developed a device that can see through walls and pinpoint a person with incredible accuracy. They call it the “Kinect of the future,” after Microsoft’s Xbox 360 motion-sensing camera. Shown publicly this week for the first time, the project from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Laboratory (CSAIL) used three radio antennas spaced about a meter apart and pointed at a wall. A desk cluttered with wires and circuits generated and interpreted the radio waves. On the other side of the wall, a person walked around the room and the system represented that person as a red dot on a computer screen. The system tracked the movements with an accuracy of plus or minus 10 centimeters, which is about the width of an adult hand.
If you’re an early Microsoft Surface adopter with buyer’s remorse, Best Buy can help out. for the first-generation Surface RT and Surface Pro, in exchange for store credit. Best Buy promises a minimum trade-in value of $200, and a maximum of $350. . for “Good” condition, but if your Pro looks like it’s never been used, Gazelle says it will pay $394.
Google will reportedly transition away from Google TV and introduce the name Android TV.
Novatel Wireless’ latest device for vehicle tracking can be self-installed and has an accelerometer and GPS combo that can keep a close eye on driving habits. The machine-to-machine sector is growing on many fronts, including applications such as fleet management, usage-based insurance, and driver-behavior management. These are trends that Novatel hopes to take advantage of with the introduction of the MT 3060. The integrated accelerometer and GPS, along with features for impact detection, allows the device to detect vehicle speed, location, hard braking, cornering, and acceleration. The device can also monitor the health of the car’s battery. Drivers can install the MT 3060 instead of having to pay for a professional to do the job, according to the company.
The reported participation of technology companies in the U.S. National Security Agency’s surveillance programs has prompted digital rights watchdog the Electronic Frontier Foundation to resign from the Global Network Initiative, a multistakeholder group whose members include Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and Facebook and whose stated mission is to advance privacy and freedom of expression online. The GNI was founded in 2008 specifically to develop an approach for dealing with increased government pressure on information and communication technology companies to comply with domestic laws in ways that may conflict with international standards on freedom of expression and privacy. Its members include human rights and press freedom groups, academics, investors, online services providers and other technology vendors. “While much has been accomplished in these five years, EFF can no longer sign its name on joint statements knowing now that GNI’s corporate members have been blocked from sharing crucial information about how the US government has meddled with these companies’ security practices through programs such as PRISM and BULLRUN,” the EFF said Thursday in a . According to media reports based on documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, the U.S. government uses these programs to collect user electronic communications from online services providers including Microsoft, Yahoo, Google and Facebook and collaborates with or forces companies to decrypt secure communications.
to allow the company to slap your real name and face alongside ads, under an expansion of its “shared endorsements” program. Getting here took a while, and it took a slow expansion of the Google+ social service. . Google+ integration throughout Google’s services seemed pretty handy at first. When searching the Play Store, the power of “shared endorsements” showed you when your friends like a given app (not unlike what iOS and OS X users see when looking for game recommendations in Apple’s Game Center app). When searching the web, Google+ identified when your buddies +1’d a given site. Now, Google’s bringing your real name, face, reviews, and comments to Search ads across the web.
An apparent bug causes the screens on some iPhone 5s models to briefly flash to blue when you try to switch apps from iWork and then the phone restarts.
Here are five British TV shows available to stream (one for the first time) that are worth a watch.
Facebook is making it easier for people to find you, so it’s about that time again: Check your privacy settings.
Fingerprint recognition is such a hot topic that hoaxers are moving in on the action too: On Friday a news release claiming that Samsung Electronics planned to acquire a Swedish developer of fingerprint technology turned out to be a fake. The news release stated that Samsung was buying Fingerprint Cards for $650 million in cash, but the Swedish company swiftly denounced it as a fake—although not before some news outlets reported it as fact. “The previous press release was not sent by Fingerprint Cards AB. Trading in the share has been suspended. What has happened will be reported to the police and to the Swedish Financial Supervisory Authority,” the Swedish company said on its website. An email sent to the address listed in the fake release went unanswered.
Google’s website for Malaysia was briefly tampered with on Friday, underscoring continuing weaknesses in entities administering crucial website address database records. The site, “google.com.my,” was functioning normally later on Friday, but had briefly displayed a page put in place by the hackers. A group calling itself “” claimed responsibility for the hack on Facebook. According to the group’s Facebook page, it claimed to have modified Google domains for Serbia, Kenya, Burundi and Pakistan over the last few weeks. The country-code top level domain “.my” is administered by the Malaysia Network Information Center (MYNIC). An official contacted Friday morning said the organization was investigating a DNS (Domain Name System) attack. It wasn’t immediately clear how the group performed the attack.
for Android's modern UI-style makeover behind done, Microsoft is turning its attention to boosting the app's functionality, recently releasing an update that packs a plethora of improvements and new features. The company didn’t provide a complete list of all 150 improvements, but most appear to be bug fixes, multi-language support, and other minor tweaks. Nevertheless, Outlook.com fans will find a lot to love in the new app, including improved search capabilities, alias and vacation support, new color themes, and the ability to download all your email. Chalk this one up in the “it's about time” category, but Outlook for Android now supports the ability to search your entire message history, and not just the emails on your device. Overall, the new feature works pretty well. Outlook is able to figure out pretty quickly whether or not a keyword exists on your device and then offers the chance to search messages on Microsoft’s servers. The server-side search obviously takes longer, but is still pretty quick. It searches the current folder you’re in first—typically your inbox—and then offers to scan all folders in your account.
Hackers capitalize on other people’s mistakes. But they make their own as well. Case in point: A was discovered after the source code of numerous products, including the Web application development platform ColdFusion, sat parked on a hacker’s unprotected Web server open to the Internet. The breach, which also encompassed 2.9 million encrypted customer credit card records, was independently found what turned out to be the company’s source code on a hacking gang’s server. Adobe’s source code “was hidden, but it was not cleverly hidden,” Holden said.
Humor me while I put my local newscaster voice on for a second: “Are perverts taking over your webcam and using it to spy on you? It’s easier than you think!” I’m only half joking. I don’t know if they spy on you personally, but it is fairly easy for someone to take over your webcam, whether it’s law enforcement or someone shadier. and several other victims learned this year. In the so-called “sextortion” case. Wolf and a number of other women worldwide were spied on without their knowledge, and the perpetrator captured compromising images. He contacted them via stolen email accounts, according to the FBI, then used the threat of publicizing these images to try to extract favors from the victims. The details were revealed by the FBI in late September. Wolf’s tale started when she received a message from a stranger who threatened to distribute nude pictures of her “all over the Internet…and your dream of being a model will be transformed into a pornstar.” Multiple nude photos were attached to the email for emphasis.
If you’ve fallen hard for a superthin notebook, you’re probably running into the same issues I am. Mine has a beautiful display and great battery life, but it has just two USB ports—only one of which is USB 3.0—and it doesn’t have a hardwired ethernet port. The transceiver for my wireless mouse and keyboard occupies one port, and a USB-to-ethernet dongle consumes the other. Unplug the dongle so I can connect a hard drive, and I lose my network connection. Unplug the transceiver and I lose my external mouse and keyboard. If you’re getting by with just a tablet, you’re probably having even more connectivity issues than I am, especially when it comes to driving an external display. So I decided to check out the $220 Targus Universal USB 3.0 DV Docking Station with Power. If Targus wants it back, it’ll have to pry it out of my cold, dead hands. This little device has become as essential to my day-to-day productivity as my coffee mug. I set the back of the computer on top of the dock, and its wedge shape lifts the computer off the surface of my desk, increasing airflow around it and keeping it cooler. A rubber strip running across the 10.63-inch width of the dock prevents the computer from sliding off. Targus uses an in-line power brick, so there’s no wall wart to hog space on your outlet strip. The dock takes up my notebook’s sole USB 3.0 port, but it provides two more plus four USB 2.0 ports (I increased that number to seven available USB 2.0 ports by connecting one of them to the four-port USB hub in my monitor). I tested the USB 3.0 port’s performance by transferring a 10GB collection of files and folders as well as a single 10GB file from a Toshiba Canvio Slim II portable USB 3.0 hard drive to my notebook’s SSD (a read test).
, it’s time to accept the likelihood that there won’t be a BlackBerry a year from now. Your business will be in for a rude awakening if it relies on the once-mighty smartphone for mobile communication and productivity. You don’t need to abandon BlackBerry immediately and run for the lifeboats, but you do need to know what your options are. Here are five things you should start thinking about now in order to prepare for a transition away from BlackBerry. If you’ve built your entire mobile ecosystem around BlackBerry, the first issue you need to address is which mobile platform (or platforms) you should switch to if BlackBerry ceases to be an option. “Assuming your BlackBerry devices are company-owned, is your go-forward plan the same? Or is BYOD in your future? Or maybe a mixture of the two options? The answer here potentially affects your security model and deployment plan.”
It can cater to an audience of one, instead of engineering frenetic action designed to keep groups of people entertained. When you play alone, horror games deliver more scares, action sequences are more intense. It's also much easier to surrender to the experience when someone isn’t screaming in your headset, “Dude, you just got pwned!” Check out this list of some of the most immersive and enthralling single-player gaming experiences you'll ever have. We'll start with a good ol' zombie apocalypse.
Indian outsourcer Infosys saw profit decline even as revenue grew in the third quarter, as a result of an increase in salaries and a provision for a visa investigation in the U.S. The company reported revenue of $2 billion for the quarter, up 15 percent from the same quarter a year earlier under IFRS (international financial reporting standards). But net profit was down 11 percent year on year at $383 million. Infosys also set aside $35 million in connection with a possible civil resolution of a visa issue with U.S. authorities. The company has forecast revenue growth of 9 percent to 10 percent for its fiscal year ending March 31. It had earlier cautiously forecast revenue growth in a broader range of 6 percent to 10 percent. While overall discretionary spending by customers is muted, there are some growth markets including cloud-related deployments, CEO S.D. Shibulal said in a conference call Friday.
Alibaba Group is targeting the U.S. market with a $200 million investment in ShopRunner, an online retailer that competes with Amazon.com, a source familiar with the deal said Friday. The investment in ShopRunner comes at a time when the Chinese e-commerce giant has been actively investing in promising technology ventures in the U.S. and in its home market, according to the source. Started in 2010, ShopRunner is an online retailer that offers free two-day shipping on goods for a $79 annual membership fee. The service rivals Amazon's own Prime membership program, which also offers free two-day shipping at the same price. ShopRunner could not immediately be reached for comment on the deal.
An appliance designed for Web 2.0 companies may take them back to the future with tape storage. Tape has been around since the dawn of electronic computers and is still used for many types of long-term storage, but it hasn’t played much of a role in modern Web-based applications. When consumers go to check out old photos on social media sites, it’s likely those images will be stored on low-cost spinning disks, though Facebook is now for this type of data. Now tape specialist Spectra Logic is introducing a software interface and an appliance to help companies with huge amounts of less-used data shift it over to tape libraries. Tape is the cheapest way to store files for a long time that don’t need to be used frequently, said Molly Rector, Spectra’s executive vice president of product management and worldwide marketing. Spectra Logic is jumping on what some industry analysts call a in some organizations with big data. Overall sales of tape systems are falling, but individual deployments are getting bigger, analysts say. Low cost and energy demands are among tape’s calling cards.
Facebook pulls the plug on a setting that allowed people to prevent others from finding them by name using the Facebook search bar, the company said on Thursday.
. The technology, which involves a mobile app working in conjunction with a small card-reading dongle plugged into the headphone jack of a smartphone or tablet, has been a boon for service professionals who previously were mostly limited to accepting cash or checks as tender. is an iOS 7-optimized iPhone app that takes a slightly different approach, entirely doing away with a card reader, instead using the phone’s camera to read (not photograph) the numbers on the front of a MasterCard or Visa card. After tapping in the card’s security code as well as the customer’s billing zip code and finger-drawn signature the transaction is processed Flint’s payment gateway partner. Dispensing with extra hardware translates into simplicity and reliability, says Flint Mobile co-founder and CEO Greg Goldfarb. “It’s the fact that if I’m a photographer or a fitness trainer and I’m going from place to place during my day I have enough trouble keeping track of my keys and my wallet and my phone,” he says.