, anyone who is able to work in various environments because of digital and mobile technology (home, office, Starbucks, plastic lounge chair by the pool while on vacation) is a digital nomad. However, for the last year and a half I have lived truly nomadically. My wife and I put all our possessions into storage (except for two backpacks and two large dufflebags) and now live internationally, choosing countries to stay based on, well, whim more than anything else, and working from wherever we go. During that time I've lived in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. I've been robbed, stranded, and, worst of all, disconnected from Internet connectivity and reliable electricity. for any length of time.
Open source is a development model and not a support one that does bug fixing, according to global CEO and president, Jim Whitehurst. "On a conceptional level, open source is a development model to come up with great software," he said. One of the problems Whitehurst highlights with is that the things that make it an attractive development model, such as breaking problems down into small pieces and rapid fixing, also make it challenging. "It's very modular, and the saying in the open source community is that we don't do bug fixes, we fix it in the next release, but you release early release often," he said.
The Scottish Government plans to roll out Windows 8 tablet PCs to key civil servants in a bid to boost efficiency and improve public services. Staff will be offered the all running Microsoft's latest operating system. It made the decision to go ahead with the deployment following a successful proof of concept with Trustmarque, which developed a fully-customized Windows 8 solution. Some 20 key government executives and 20 technicians took part in the pilot. The proof of concept also included Microsoft User Experience Virtualization, which provides roaming profiles for staff to log on to any computer on the same network and access their documents.
Silicon Motion Technology last week announced it has begun shipping USB drive manufacturers samples of a new USB 3.0 controller chip for flash drives that could boost their performance by up to 50 percent. The company said the new SM3267 integrated controller is expected to deliver up to 160 megabyte-per-second read times and 60 megabyte-per-second write speeds through a single channel; that would be a 30 percent to 50 percent performance improvement over today's USB 3.0 flash drive technology. Even though support about 100MB/s read speeds. "We are pleased to announce that SM3267 has received design-ins from most of our current USB controller customers, including many top-tier OEMs, and we expect SM3267-based USB 3.0 flash drives will be commercially available starting in the fourth quarter of 2013," Wallace Kou, CEO of Silicon Motion, said in a statement.
Perhaps you're a student who only needs for a limited time. Maybe you want to kick the tires on Microsoft's office suite for more than 30 days or just don't want to plunk down the money for it yet. Here's a way to for Microsoft Office so you can get the full features without paying for it (for at least 180 days). Microsoft offers—for up to five more times. This gives you about six months of full usage of Microsoft Office. To do this, you'll need to find the Microsoft Shared folder under C:\Program Files\Common Files, then open a command window and run the Microsoft-provided utility, OSPREARM.EXE. Easy peasy.
The security researcher who yesterday was awarded $100,000 by Microsoft spent about two weeks pondering, then demonstrating a new way to circumvent Windows' defensive technologies. In an interview, James Forshaw, the head of vulnerability research at U.K.-based Context Information Security, described in the most general terms the work that resulted in the big bounty. "When Microsoft announced the initial bounties, I first thought about the mitigations I wanted to go over." said Forshaw. "Windows has a lot of mitigating in place, so I started to brainstorm. I asked myself, 'How would I do it [if I was a cyber criminal]?'" From start to finish—from those brainstorming sessions to an exploit that proved his mitigation bypass approach worked—Forshaw said he spent about half a month on the project. "From my initial thought to a full working proof of concept was about two weeks," he said.
The almost magical capabilities of mobile devices help use be productive and collaborative, entertained and connected, are coming to vehicles along with the risks and dangers.
Revenue from mobile ads and searches more than doubled in the first half of 2013, reaching $3 billion, as advertisers began seeing value in offering ads over tablets and smartphones. The increase was 145 percent over the $1.2 billion recorded for the first half of 2012, according a released last week by the Interactive Advertising Bureau. Analysts and the IAB attributed the surge in mobile to several factors, including an ability to better measure the success of mobile ads. "Mobile advertising's breakneck growth is evidence that marketers are recognizing the tremendous power of smaller screens," said Randall Rothenberg, CEO of IAB in a statement.
has secured its first conviction following an investigation by the agency's National Cyber Crime Unit (NCCU). Launched last week as a replacement for the UK's Serious Organised Crime Agency, the NCA is being positioned as a single law enforcement agency that will be responsible for leading the national response to organized crime—this covers everything from to cybercrime, as well as tracking down child sex abusers using the Internet to target children. The NCCU is a combination of the that was built up under SOCA and the Metropolitan Police's e-crime unit, which was brought in under the NCA's control after building up a strong reputation in recent years. Olukunle Babatunde, 27, of Croydon, South East London, was sentenced to serve five years and six months at Inner London Crown Court, after pleading guilty to a number of offenses including conspiracy to defraud banks, financial institutions, and their customers.
A cadre of prominent broadcasters including ABC and CBS petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court on Friday to shut down Aereo, a television streaming service, alleging that Aereo infringes their copyrights and puts their businesses at risk, according to a Wall Street Journal report.
Crowd games thrive at IndieCade, an ideal showcase for games designed to let you look into your opponent’s eyes and hear the roar of a cheering crowd at your back.
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 around the 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.
After a rollercoaster ride, tech stocks rebounded toward the end of the week following reports of a possible compromise on the political impasse over the U.S. budget. The political pall hanging over tech and other sectors came amid gloomy reports of a continued slump in the PC market. With the U.S. government shutdown in its second week and the possibility of a national debt default looming, tech stocks took a beating earlier this week. The government itself is a big purchaser of technology. In addition, the halt of federal expenditures has “a ripple effect” through the entire economy, noted Andrew Bartels, chief economist at Forrester Research. Among other issues, the government is expected to reach its borrowing limit next week. After that, if Congress does not vote to raise the debt ceiling, the government will have to default on at least some debts.
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.
