«Battlefield 4» vermag in den Multiplayer-Schlachten ebenso das eigene Ego zu steigern wie es den Spieler am Boden zerstört. Ein Krieg zwischen Frust und Lust.
Die «Made-in-China»-Kopie der neuen Apple-Smartphones gleicht den Originalen bis aufs Haar. Praktisch nur Betriebssystem und Preis unterscheiden sich von den Vorbildern.
Wieder konnte Apple den Schweizer Verkaufsstart eines neuen Produktes - und vor allem sich selber - feiern. In China legte das iPad Air einen Blitzstart hin.
Ein ehrgeiziges Open-Source-Projekt will zusätzlich Metadaten von Nachrichten vor Blicken Unbefugter schützen. Vor allem schützt E-Mail 3.0 auch vor staatlicher Spionage.
Während die meisten Telefone schon beim Gedanken an Wasser den Geist aufgeben, fischte ein Schwede ein funktionierendes Nokia-Smartphone aus einem See, das drei Monate dort gelegen hatte.
Als wohl erste Autofahrerin ist eine Frau in San Diego bestraft worden, weil sie hinter dem Steuer Googles Datenbrille Glass trug.
Facebook schafft schon wieder eine Funktion zum Schutz von Nutzerprofilen ab. Die Funktion der Chroniksuche nach Namen werde bald entfernt, teilte das Online-Netzwerk mit.
Nach unzähligen Leaks ist das Google Smartphone inklusive Android 4.4. offiziell. Kitkat erstrahlt in frischem Design, bietet eine Menge neuer Funktionen und soll auch ältere Geräte bedienen.
Putz-Roboter werden immer verbreiteter. Auf Rasenmäher und Staubsauger folgen die Wischroboter. Der iRobot Braava 380 lässt allerdings noch etwas an Selbstständigkeit zu wünschen übrig.
Apple dominiert den Tablet-Markt nicht mehr allein. Samsung konnte den Marktanteil in einem Jahr fast verdoppeln und liegt nun bei über 20 Prozent. Die iPads liegen aber weiterhin vorn.
Der illegale Netzwerk-Zugriff beim US-Softwarehersteller Adobe war fast 13-mal schlimmer als angenommen: Statt nur 3 sollen rund 38 Millionen Kunden betroffen sein.
Valves Online-Portal für Games hat die 65-Millionen-Marke geknackt. Für PC-User führt fast kein Weg an Steam vorbei. Mit dem geplanten Steam OS dürfte die Expansion noch weitergehen.
Apple-Stores sind ein alter Hut: Google soll laut Insidern beim Verkauf seiner Datenbrille auf ein aussergewöhnliches Konzept setzen und das Gadget auf dem Wasser anbieten.
Das Penis-Dach einer Kirche in den USA sorgt weltweit für Gelächter. Auch Schweizer Gebäude kriegen im Internet ihr Fett weg - wegen Schülerstreichen und Hakenkreuz-Grundrissen.
Google's newest handset may have ho-hum hardware, but that KitKat sure is tasty.
Gamers who upgraded their PCs to Windows 8.1 are enduring mouse-control problems that affect their ability to play, a problem Microsoft acknowledged this week. . that the company hasn’t yet found a solution. “First off, we want to thank our gaming community for the detailed feedback many of you have provided on these issues. While we don’t have a date yet for the release of a fix, we are working to get these issues resolved as quickly as possible,” wrote a Microsoft forum moderator identified as Naman R.
A project aims to bring an inexpensive 9-inch portable monitor to the popular $25 Raspberry Pi PC, which comes without a keyboard, mouse or monitor. The HDMIPi will include an LCD panel that will show images at a resolution of 1280 by 800 pixels. Computers can be hooked up to the monitor via an HDMI controller board that can be wired to the LCD. While the monitor’s primary target is Raspberry Pi users, it can also be used with devices that have an HDMI output port, such as laptops, phones, tablets, video cameras, and gaming consoles. Raspberry Pi is a popular uncased computer that is being widely used as a media server and in some cases as a PC replacement.
The percentage of PC users running Windows 8.1 doubled in a month’s time, according to the latest October data compiled by metrics firm Net Applications. Of course, that’s still just a tiny fraction of the overall PC market: 1.72 percent, . But combined with the number of users running Windows 8, the combined market share of the Windows 8.x OS topped 9.25 percent. At its current pace, that share should top 10 percent by the end of the year. (In September, Windows 8 commanded 8.02 percent, and Windows 8.1 0.87 percent, for a combined share of 8.89 percent.) And sorry, Linux: Windows 8.1 now tops you, too. Linux commanded 1.61 percent of all PCs measured by Net Applications for the month of October. Mac OS X 10.8 was used by 3.31 percent of users, Net Applications found. Of course, the bad news for Microsoft is that its two older operating systems continue to dominate the PC landscape. According to Net Applications’s figures, more than 46 percent of users run Windows 7, and 31.24 percent of users continue to run Windows XP. Both numbers dropped less than a percent from a month ago.
It’s official: Instagram now has ads, and the first one appeared Friday courtesy of fashion designer Michael Kors. A colorful of a luxury watch sitting on a table appeared on the photo-sharing app Friday, an Instagram spokesman confirmed. It was shown to women in the U.S., regardless of whether they were following the brand. Instagram began last week, but the Michael Kors post is the first branded advertisement to officially run on the service. More ads are on the way, Instagram said, but the company did not specify when or how often.
Android 4.4, code name KitKat, has been officially released, and new devices are already shipping with the hotly-anticipated operating system. . . The HTC One will receive the KitKat upgrade within the next 90 days if you're a subscriber on one of the four major U.S. carriers. If you're using an unlocked or developer version of the handset, the One will get an update within just 30 days. HTC hasn't announced plans for any of its other handsets but has promised updated information "in the near future."
Among the great games we're playing this week are something slow, something fast, and something in between.
Response times at the ailing HealthCare.gov have improved significantly in recent days as a technology team tries to fix the problems with the U.S. government’s health-insurance shopping website, officials said. Page response times in the first days after the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services launched the site Oct. 1 were around eight seconds, an “unacceptable” performance when fast-loading website response times are measured in milliseconds, said Jeffrey Zients, a former acting director at the White House Office of Management and Budget overseeing fixes to the site. The current page response times are now less than one second—or “1,000 milliseconds,” as Zients described it—but the team working on that issue still has a “lot to do there,” he said during a press briefing Friday. The tech team working on HealthCare.gov is on track to meet an HHS goal of having the site work smoothly for most users by the end of November, Zients said. The team had a “frustrating” setback this week with hours of outages last weekend and Wednesday night due to a hardware problem at hosting provide Verizon Communications, he said.
Marin County, California, has begun the search for new ERP (enterprise resource planning) software to replace a troubled SAP implementation that generated an ugly legal battle between the county, SAP and systems integrator Deloitte. County supervisors voted this week to approve an RFP (request for proposals) from vendors who want to take on the job. Officials are focused on “tier two” vendors, which are generally smaller and more focused, and especially ones that have experience in the public sector, said County Administrator Matthew Hymel during a meeting of the supervisory board, which was webcast. “A big lesson learned [from the SAP project] was around fit for an organization our size and the business that we’re in,” Hymel said. Tier one ERP vendors such as SAP and Oracle offer “very complicated products that serve Fortune 500 companies,” he added. “Our employees were definitely impacted by our last implementation so they taking this very seriously,” Hymel said. “We’re all in agreement of the need to do this right.”
Now that you’ve been liberated by the mobile age, you may be ready to consign your clunky desktop PC to the scrap heap. Not so fast. Though it’s certainly past its prime, the desktop PC is far from useless. For some tasks, it’s actually still the superior tool. Here are six compelling reasons to keep the old workhorse around. and its support for multi-streaming shows promise, though it is not widely available at the moment. that support up to eight displays. , or the use of multiple graphic cards in SLI configurations. And though they have fallen out of favor in recent years, dual CPU systems remain an option for the most exacting tasks such as CAD (computer-aided design), media editing, and encoding.
A developer version of Google’s Chrome browser will automatically flag and block malware that the user’s anti-malware system wouldn’t otherwise detect, Google said. The “Canary” version of Chrome, designed for early testing by developers and others, will show a small warning note in the area of the screen reserved for downloads, notifying the user that it had prevented malware from being downloaded, Google said in a . The new technology is in addition to Google’s existing “Safe Browsing” capability, which blocks up to 10,000 new websites per day, based on a reputation score that Google develops and assigns. The downloads Google will block with the new technology aren’t flagged by an antivirus program as “traditional” malware, and people may not even know they’re there, representatives said. They may change browser settings or install ads, hijacking the browser for its own purposes. Malware is constantly evolving and improving, as are the anti-malware systems deployed by browsers and dedicated software. As such, it’s difficult to provide a comprehensive, up-to-date perspective on which solution protects you best. In May, NSS Labs comparing the effectiveness of the five leading browsers against a pool of 754 pieces of real-world malware. But that test, while indicative of the relative strength of each browser, is already out of date: NSS tested Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 10, for example, instead of the latest IE11 installed in Windows 8.1. And NSS also tested Chrome 25/26, while Chrome is now up to version 30.
Rip out your computer’s microphone and webcam, turn off your Bluetooth, and put on your tinfoil hats, it’s “super amazing crazy security storytime.” A noted security researcher says he has found a new type of malware that can affect some of the lowest levels of your machine. Even more surprising, this bit of nasty code could be the first example of an airborne computer virus. No, I’m not talking about Wi-Fi downloads, but input signals converted into code by your laptop’s microphone. The new malware is dubbed badBIOS by Dragos Ruiu, the security researcher who says he uncovered it. Ruiu recently told that he’s been tracking down badBIOS for the past three years. Since badBIOS is reportedly a crafty piece of code, all he has right now is a working theory about how the malware works.
Intel’s Galileo open-source computer for the hacker and do-it-yourself crowd can now be ordered for $69.90, and is scheduled to ship at the end of November. The Galileo computer is an unenclosed circuit board that’s a little larger than a credit card, and uses Intel’s extremely low-power Quark processor. The board is a competitor to the popular $25 Raspberry Pi open-source PC, and is targeted at the community of makers and enthusiasts who make computing devices ranging from robots and health monitors to home media centers and PCs. for the board, and the price falls to $68.25 per unit for a bulk purchase of 100 boards. Galileo is based on the new line of Quark processors announced by Intel in September. The Quark chips draw less power than the company’s Atom chips, and are targeted at wearable devices and small electronics, which today typically use either microcontrollers or ARM CPUs.
Google has developed a security feature for Chrome that will allow the browser to block more types of malware downloads. Browser hijacking and other browser-based malware infections are on the rise and Google needs to protect Chrome users with native security features, the company said. It is testing the feature in a pre-release version of the browser. Linus Upson, a Google vice president, in a blog post. The security feature will trigger an alert, displayed in the download tray at the bottom of the screen, saying that Chrome blocked a malware file from being downloaded. Malicious hackers typically disguise these files as harmless applications, like screensavers and even security updates, to trick users into downloading them.
Google has paid extra attention to Android's performance, which may be good news for consumers and developers, but a problem for competitors.
The Finnish government’s computer networks have been breached by malware for years, and it is possible secure communications have been compromised, the Finnish Ministry for Foreign Affairs confirmed Friday. The malware was discovered in January but it was in place for years before being discovered, said Ari Uusikartano, director general of the Information and Documentation Division of the Ministry for Foreign Affairs of Finland. The government kept the breach secret until a Finnish TV station reported it on Thursday. “My estimate is that it has been active about two or three years,” before it was discovered, said Uusikartano. There are indications that information with the lowest level security classification has been compromised, he said. Immediately after the breach was discovered, the Finnish police started an investigation that is still ongoing, said Uusikartano.
The co-founder of Liberty Reserve, a now defunct virtual currency that was widely favored by the criminal underground, pleaded guilty on Thursday to money laundering and other charges. . The Liberty Reserve virtual currency business, launched in 2006 in Costa Rica, became a financial hub of the cybercrime world, handling more than 55 million transactions worth $6 billion over seven years, according to the indictment against Kats. Liberty Reserve’s reputation somewhat tainted the view of other virtual currencies, including Bitcoin, for their quick embrace by the criminal world. Unlike Liberty Reserve though, Bitcoin businesses and exchangers have mostly sought to comply with global financial regulations.
Today's the day, the new full-size iPad is available online and at your local Apple store.
You may love Dropbox, but your IT admin likely hates it. Consumer cloud platforms create headaches for the folks who worry about the security of corporate data and what happens to files when a person leaves the company. SecuriSync is a new cloud platform that addresses such concerns by giving an administrator the ability to audit and control employees’ files; know who edits, deletes, or shares a file and with whom they share it; and wipe a mobile device of company data if it’s lost or stolen or a user’s employment ends. And unlike many other cloud storage solutions, SecuriSync makes use of both at-rest and in-transit encryption, meaning a malefactor can’t read data when it’s stored or as it travels from one place to another. Box for Enterprise comes the closest to providing this kind of security says Mike Gold, President of Intermedia, the Mountain View, California-based company that created SecuriSync. But SecuriSync trumps Box with a 99.999% service level agreement (SLA), which amounts to promising to be up and running nine full hours a year more than other companies that only offer a 99.9% SLA. “We’ve built our solution where everything is redundant—servers, data centers, storage, routers—everything that we’ve done is replicated so if one goes down the other picks up,” Gold says.
In the heat of battle, there's one tool that trumps all. No, it's not your customizable mouse or the fancy keyboard with 100 different macro keys. It's communication. Ventrilo takes the guesswork out of what your friends are doing in-game by providing a lightweight voice over IP program to stay in constant contact.
When Google Apps arrived in 2006, it stood on the cutting edge of Web-hosted email and collaboration suites for businesses, a bold pioneer clearing a path in the new, wild frontier of enterprise cloud computing. Seven years later, complacency has diluted that innovative spirit, and Google Apps now trails competing suites from IBM, Cisco and Microsoft in areas like enterprise social networking (ESN) and unified communications (UC). Although Google improves Apps continually, the suite's main draw remains its Gmail component, as has been the case from the beginning. But is cloud email still enough to attract prospective customers and retain existing ones? Is Google leaving Apps vulnerable to rivals by taking its time boosting its ESN and UC capabilities? At healthcare company Schumacher Group, Google Apps is at risk of losing its place to Microsoft's Office 365. The Lafayette, Louisiana, company uses Apps to provide email to about 3,000 independent contractor doctors and Microsoft Exchange on premises for its full-time employees.
Supercomputer maker Cray has hired the founders and key engineers of Gnodal who will be working to develop new technology. Gnodal in Bristol, England, was founded in 2007 and specializes in high-performance networks that can be used in data centers. Its technology aims to significantly reduce power usage and running costs. The company went into administration in October under local laws for insolvency. In addition to hiring the majority of Gnodal's engineering staff, Cray also purchased the key intellectual property (IP) developed by the Gnodal team including patents and design copyrights, the company said Friday. The extra people and IP will be used to help drive Cray's future systems and complete ongoing R&D contracts, the company said. Cray has been expanding its R&D team in Europe since the launch of its Exascale Research Initiative in Europe in 2009, the company said, adding that currently it is adding significant hardware and software development activities to its operations in Europe.
You probably know that sitting on your butt all day isn’t good for you, but you might not realize just how bad it is. According to , people who spent more than 11 hours per day in a chair were 40 percent more likely to die within the next three years, compared with those who sat for 4 hours. Unsurprisingly, the tech industry is obsessed with standing desks, and companies such as Stir charge thousands of dollars for with adjustable heights. I liked the idea of working while sitting and standing throughout the day, but I didn’t believe the benefits were worth spending that much money. I also didn’t want to add a separate desk to my office, because that would require a second computer and take up too much space. Fortunately, I found a much thanks to Colin Nederkoorn, who built his own standing desk with roughly $20 worth of IKEA parts. With a bit of tweaking of Nederkoorn’s design, an extra monitor, and the right software, I now have the best of both worlds in a single desk—an area for standing, right next to a place to sit, with a seamless way to switch back and forth. Here’s what you need:
A new variant of a Trojan program that targets online banking accounts also contains code to search if infected computers have SAP client applications installed, suggesting that attackers might target SAP systems in the future. The malware was discovered a few weeks ago by Russian antivirus company Doctor Web, which shared it with researchers from ERPScan, a developer of security monitoring products for SAP systems. “We’ve analyzed the malware and all it does right now is to check which systems have SAP applications installed,” said Alexander Polyakov, chief technology officer at ERPScan. “However, this might be the beginning for future attacks.” When malware does this type of reconnaissance to see if particular software is installed, the attackers either plan to sell access to those infected computers to other cybercriminals interested in exploiting that software or they intend to exploit it themselves at a later time, the researcher said.
laptop out to pasture. With the tablet’s lighter weight, longer battery life, and near-instant boot-up, the building blocks of a productivity engine are already there. tablets have one big advantage over the iOS and Android competition: namely, the Office productivity suite, which comes free with every Surface 2 and is, of course, available for the Surface Pro 2 as well. Both also have roomy (compared with other tablets) 10.6-inch displays. The Surface Pro 2, with its full Windows OS and ability to run desktop applications, just needs a Touch or Type Cover to make a mighty fine hybrid. But for the vast majority of us who have iOS and Android tablets rather than Surface slates, other productivity options are available. With the right apps and accessories, plus a few changes in how you work, your trusty tablet just might replace a conventional laptop. ), and a lower starting price: $399 for the 16GB model, or $499 for 32GB.
Internet companies in the U.S. are demanding that the surveillance practices of the U.S. should be reformed to enhance privacy protections and provide “appropriate oversight and accountability mechanisms.” In a letter on Thursday to the chairman and members of the Committee on the Judiciary, a bulk data collection by the National Security Agency, for their contribution to the discussion. The companies had until now focused on asking the government for permission to reveal information on users’ data requests by the NSA, which are covered under “gag orders” that prohibit recipients of orders from discussing them in public. Google and Microsoft, for example, filed motions before the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to be allowed to provide aggregate statistics on orders and directives that were received under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and related regulations, which the government has so far refused.
The Rockstar Consortium that acquired Nortel Networks’ patents filed Thursday patent infringement suits against Google, Samsung, HTC, and five other companies. In a complaint in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, Marshall Division, Rockstar and subsidiary NetStar Technologies alleged that Google infringed seven of the patents acquired from Nortel. The patents, all titled “Associative Search Engine,” relate to an invention used to provide advertisements based on users’ search terms. Backed by Microsoft, Apple, RIM, Ericsson and Sony, Rockstar acquired Nortel’s patents for $4.5 billion after outbidding Google in 2011.
Update, update, update: Form that habit now, if you haven't already, to keep up with security fixes. The latest include the usual tweaks to fend off malicious attacks, and a fix to Java that should prevent it from disabling itself constantly. That would be nice. The 11.1.2 version of . The program could be crashed if someone of sufficiently evil intent exploited memory access flaws in the handling of text tracks. A bug related to WebKit memory corruption issues could allow nefarious beings to insert themselves between iTunes and the iTunes store. It has also been addressed with this update. Finally, Apple has updated its usage of libxml and libxslt to 2.9.0 and 1.1.28, respectively, to ward off potential tampering that could cause unexpected program shutdowns or the running of malicious code.
A U.S. Senate committee has voted to approve a bill that would leave in place the U.S. National Security Agency’s bulk telephone-records collection program, with some limits. , a bill sponsored by Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein (D-California). The bill would allow the NSA to continue collecting millions of U.S. telephone records, despite an outcry that the program violates the U.S. Constitution. The bill, which now advances to the Senate floor, prohibits the NSA from collecting the content of U.S. telephone calls, a practice the NSA says it is not doing now. The bill would also establish a penalty of 10 years in prison for intentional unauthorized access to data acquired under the program. The bill would also require an annual public report of the total number of queries of the NSA’s telephone metadata database and the number of times the program led to an investigation by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. It would require the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to limit the number of people at the NSA who may authorize or query the call-records database.
Africa’s demand for Internet links to the rest of the world will grow by an average of 51 percent every year until 2019, ahead of all other regions, according to a forecast by research company Telegeography. Rapid economic growth and wider Internet use will drive the increase in demand, which will be met mostly by turning on unused capacity in existing cables, according to Telegeography analyst Erik Kreifeldt. Terrestrial links are in demand partly because much of Africa still relies on satellite, which is far more expensive per bit than wired broadband, he said. Most Internet bandwidth between continents is provided by undersea cables built and financed by groups of service providers. From Africa, most of those links go to Europe. Other carriers pay to tap into those cables and link their customers to the Internet. In some parts of Africa, running cables from coastal areas to the interior is a challenge so satellite remains the major Internet source, Kreifeldt said. The capacity of international cables landing on African shores is just a fraction of the bandwidth available between Europe, the U.S. and Asia. After seven years of the growth that Telegeography forecasts, from 2012 through 2019, Africa will have 17.2Tbps (bits per second) of links to the outside world. That’s up from just 957Gbps in 2012 but will still be only about one-quarter of the international capacity of Latin America and less than that of Canada, according to Telegeography.