Italien will Internetmultis wie Google, Amazon und Yahoo stärker zur Kasse bitten. Das sieht ein Steuervorhaben der Mitte-links-Partei PD vor, die den grössten Block in der Koalitionsregierung stellt. Demnach sollen Firmen in Italien künftig nur noch über eine im Land steuerlich angemeldete Agentur im Netz werben und verkaufen dürfen.
Die österreichische Bank Raiffeisen baut derzeit IT-Beschäftigte ab. Beim Frühwarnsystem des Arbeitsmarktservice (AMS) wurden etliche Informatikmitarbeiter zur Kündigung angemeldet. In der Tageszeitung „Standard“ heisst es, dass am vergangenen Donnerstag 68 von derzeit 850 Informatikmitarbeitern zur Kündigung angemeldet wurden.
Die Konzernspitze von Google hat wütend auf die Berichte über Spionageaktionen des US-Geheimdienstes NSA gegen die Suchmaschinenkönigin reagiert. "Wenn es stimmt, dass die NSA zwischen die Google-Rechenzentren geschaut hat, ist das empörend", sagte Verwaltungsratschef Eric Schmidt dem Wall Street Journal.
Twitter will beim anstehenden Börsengang deutlich mehr Geld einnehmen als zuletzt gedacht. Die 70 Millionen Aktien sollen Investoren nun zu jeweils 23 bis 25 Dollar (17 bis 18 Euro) angeboten werden, wie der Kurznachrichtendienst heute mitteilte. Bisher war eine Preisspanne von 17 bis 20 Dollar (12,6 bis 14,8 Euro) angepeilt worden.
Der angeschlagene Smartphone-Pionier Blackberry erhält von seinem Grossaktionär Fairfax und weiteren Investoren rund eine Milliarde Dollar (741 Mio. Euro). Zudem werde der aus Deutschland stammende Ex-Siemens-Manager Thorsten Heins das Unternehmen verlassen, teilte der kanadische Konzern heute mit. John Chen wird den Konzern demnach übergangsweise leiten.
Inmitten einer neuen Eskalation des Patentkriegs in der Mobilfunkbranche hat Samsung sein Lizenzabkommen mit Nokia für weitere fünf Jahre verlängert. Für den südkoreanischen Handymarktführer werden dabei vom kommenden Jahr an zusätzliche Zahlungen fällig, wie Nokia am Montag mitteilte.
Sesselrücken bei der auf IT fokussierten PR-Agentur Jenni Kommunikation: Sylvana Zimmermann, seit über acht Jahren als Beraterin bei der in Zürich angesiedelten Agentur tätig, wird laut Mitteilung per 1. Dezember 2013 zur stellvertretenden Geschäftsführerin der von Urs Jenni gegründeten und geleiteten Firma ernannt.
Swissco, Legic und Kaba wollen eine Lücke in der NFC-Welt (Nearfield Communication) schliessen. Sie arbeiten zusammen, um in Bälde Zeiterfassung und Zutrittskontrolle mit Near Field Communication sicher und einfach in die täglichen Geschäftsprozesse integrieren zu können.
Verbände und Bürgerrechtsorganisationen aus 40 Staaten haben den britischen Premierminister David Cameron in der Geheimdienstaffäre zur Achtung der Freiheitsrechte aufgerufen. „Wir glauben, dass die Antwort der (...) Regierung auf die Aufdeckung der Massenüberwachung der digitalen Kommunikation die grundlegenden Menschenrechte im Land erodiert“, schrieben die Vertreter von 70 Organisationen in der Zeitung „The Guardian“.
Der in Sursee domizilierte Microsoft Gold-Partner IOZ erhält für seine Spezialisierung auf Cloud-Produkte den seltenen Status eines Microsoft Cloud Deployment Partners. Die innerschweizer Firma zählt damit neu zu den wenigen Schweizer Cloud Deployment Partnern des Herstellers.
In a valiant attempt to make social-media addicts safer doing anything, the car can send a customizable text message or Facebook update to eager followers.
. According to Schmidt, the newly-revealed snooping "just doesn't pass the smell test." "It's really outrageous that the National Security Agency was looking between the Google data centers, if that's true," said Schmidt. "The steps that the organization was willing to do without good judgment, to pursue its mission and potentially violate people's privacy; it's not OK. It's just not okay...it's perfectly possible that there are more revelations to come." In Schmidt's view, the NSA has gone overboard. "The NSA allegedly collected the phone records of 320 million people in order to identify roughly 300 people who might be a risk. It's just bad public policy…and perhaps illegal." He admits that "There clearly are cases where evil people exist, but you don't have to violate the privacy of every single citizen of America to find them."
On Monday, Microsoft said it will offer a free 16-week IT course for soldiers transitioning out of the military into civilian life—with a guaranteed job at the end of it. The Microsoft Software & Systems Academy will be based on the , the technology consulting firm administering the program. As the program expands, those additional soldiers will be guaranteed at least a job interview. Microsoft launched a pilot implementation of the Academy at the Joint Base Lewis-McCord (JBLM) in Washington, where about 8,000 service members are expected to move out of the military into civilian life as the U.S. winds down conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Vow to Hire Heroes Act, sponsored by Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), allows those soldiers to begin the transition process while they’re actually employed by the military. “American servicemembers possess the drive, self-discipline and problem-solving skills that are essential for the technology industry,” said Microsoft executive vice president and general counsel Brad Smith in a statement. “The Microsoft Software & Systems Academy is a bridge between one great career—serving in the U.S. military—and another, creating technologies that improve lives.”
With its last gasping breath, the once-revered mobile company is making some very questionable business decisions. Where can it even go from here?
If you’re one of the early adopters who spent , get ready to cheer: Netflix now has a number of of 4K video clips for you to watch on your state-of-the-art set. Unfortunately they’re . But who’s counting? In January, . The idea was to push the Netflix movies and TV shows at a bitrate that could deliver content at or near 1080p resolutions to take advantage of the latest HDTVs. In January, however, TV manufacturers dumped their 3D TV experiment and began moving to what the industry called .
Proposals in Congress to end the National Security Agency’s bulk collection of U.S. telephone records would compromise the agency’s ability to find and track terrorists, representatives of the intelligence community said Monday. The USA Freedom Act, by more than 85 U.S. lawmakers, would reduce NSA surveillance capabilities to the levels before the Sept. 11, 2011, terrorist attacks on the U.S., said Brad Wiegmann, deputy assistant attorney general of the National Security Division of the U.S. Department of Justice. Wiegmann and other U.S. intelligence officials faced questions about alternatives to the controversial NSA phone records collection program during a hearing of the U.S. Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB). The USA Freedom Act, sponsored by Senator Patrick Leahy, a Vermont Democrat, and Representative Jim Sensenbrenner, a Wisconsin Republican, would “essentially shut down” the phone records program, said Robert Litt, general counsel of the U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence. The USA Freedom Act would require the NSA to show the records it seeks to collect are related to a foreign power, a suspected agent of a foreign power or a person in contact with a suspected agent. Among other changes, the bill would also require the NSA to get court orders to search U.S. residents’ communications obtained without individualized warrants.
for free. Developed by a Google subsidiary called Niantic, Ingress is an augmented reality game set in an alternative version of the real world. Players take a side -- Enlightened or Resistance -- which battle against each other over "Exotic Matter" (or XM), which is seeded throughout actual locations around the world. Gameplay involves taking control of "portals," which are typically placed in conjunction with the location of popular real-world landmarks such as sculptures, libraries, churches, and other heavily-trafficked buildings. The bigger the city, the more portals it tends to have, with densely populated areas the most portal-rich parts of the game map. Additional portals are added to the game as users -- now located in 200 countries -- continue to sign up. Naturally, the game mechanics involve significant complexity beyond this basic setup, but the key is that Ingress involves physically traveling in the real world to capture territories and collect virtual objects to score points and advance in the game. over 1 million downloads. The game will transition from the current open beta to its official public launch on December 14 as the story begins to heat up.
Twitter on Monday increased the price of shares in its initial public offering to a range of $23 to $25 per share and also revealed that IBM has claimed the company has infringed on several patents. Twitter plans to issue 70 million shares, according to . Twitter on Monday also the risk factors disclosed to the SEC, expanding the intellectual property right threats the company faces, specifically highlighting a claim by IBM. “From time to time we receive claims from third parties which allege that we have infringed upon their intellectual property rights. In this regard, we recently received a letter from International Business Machines Corporation, or IBM, alleging that we infringe on at least three U.S. patents held by IBM,” said Twitter in the filing, adding that IBM has invited Twitter to negotiate a business resolution.
The creators of CryptoLocker, a piece of malware that encrypts user data and holds it for ransom, are giving users who removed the malicious program from their computers a second chance to recover their files, but at a much higher cost. CryptoLocker is a malicious program that falls into a category of malware called ransomware. Once installed on a computer, ransomware applications typically prevent victims from accessing their files or even their operating system until they pay money to the malware authors. Security researchers generally advise users against giving into this kind of extortion and in many cases there is a way to regain access to everything without paying up. However, CryptoLocker uses solid public-private key cryptography to encrypt files that match a long list of extensions, including documents, spreadsheets, images and even AutoCAD design files. According to researchers from antivirus firm Sophos, the malware’s creators got the encryption process right and , which are unique for every computer and are stored on attackers’ servers, without paying up.
, and it is offering its document management system for free to small businesses in the United States and Canada. The new free version of MaxxDocs includes up to five named users and works with a wide variety of standard scanners. You can store up to 10,000 documents with the free MaxxDocs. into MaxxDocs. Once scanned, you can organize your documents into folders, and manage them efficiently using index fields and metadata. You can also work with the documents—annotate, redact, draw, highlight, and more—and you can manage document security by defining the users or groups that should have access to the information. Let’s not pretend this is purely altruism, though. The free MaxxDocs is a carrot designed to introduce organizations to the value of digitally storing and organizing documents, but the benefits that really make MaxxDocs valuable will still cost you.
You might think Okta CEO Todd McKinnon would be concerned by the fact that Salesforce.com just launched a competing cloud identity management service, but if McKinnon indeed is, he’s good at hiding it. “It looks like they spent a year building all the stuff that’s really easy to build [in identity management],” McKinnon said in an interview before the start of his company’s first user conference this week in San Francisco. “It’s all the stuff we had built in the first six months of our company.” has a paucity of pre-built integrations to cloud applications, compared to Okta’s more than 3,000, McKinnon added. It also decided to embed software from Forgerock for the Identity Connect component of Identity, which allows for connections to Microsoft Active Directory systems. “They just don’t have their own people working on it,” said McKinnon, who headed engineering at Salesforce.com until 2009. While “it’s always concerning when a big competitor comes into your market,” until Salesforce.com spends more time on its product Okta has little to fear, he added.
Hewlett-Packard has announced a multi-year effort to port its Nonstop server systems, used by banks, telcos and other businesses that need maximum reliability, from Intel’s Itanium architecture to x86. It’s HP’s latest and perhaps biggest move to reduce its reliance on Intel’s Itanium chip, which never gained wide adoption and appears to be , and it’s now shifting its attention to Nonstop. “We’ve committed to port the whole Nonstop environment—applications, middleware and tools—to x86,” Randy Meyer, vice president and general manager for HP’s Integrity server business, said in an interview last week. HP says the x86 version will be a “parallel offering,” not that it’s walking away from Itanium. It recently started selling Nonstop customers the newest Itanium 9500 processors, known as Poulson, and will follow with the Kittson Itanium chips after that, Meyer said.
from Western Digital subsidiary HGST started shipping on Monday. The new 3.5-inch Ultrastar He6 hard drives are currently designed for the enterprise market, offering 50 percent more capacity than HGST's 4TB drives. The hermetically sealed helium drives also consume 23 percent less power, are 38 percent lighter, and run several degrees cooler than the company's 4TB drives, HGST says. Helium is one-seventh the density of air, which translates into less drag on the hard drive's moving parts. That adds up to a smaller amount of turbulence and less heat inside the drive. With less turbulence and heat, you don't need as much power to run or cool the drive. The He6 also crams more platters into the same space. HGST's 4TB models, for example, offer 5 disks, while the Ultrastar HE6 can pack seven disks without increasing the size of the drive.
Linux operating system creator Linus Torvalds has proposed that Linux 4.0, an upcoming release of the open-source software, should be dedicated to stability and bug fixing. Although his initial reaction to a suggestion for a separate bug-fixing release from Dirk Hohndel, chief Linux and open source technologist at Intel, was to criticize it, as "I didn't see most of us having the attention span required for that," Torvalds is now asking for comments on a proposal to have Linux 4.0 as the bug-fix release in about a year's time. Hohndel discussed a bugs fixing release at LinuxCon Europe in Edinburgh, U.K., last month. He asked Torvalds whether he thought the focus of releases was too much on speed and adding new features, and maybe Linux developers should take a step back and have a release focused on bug-fixes and stability, as there was a mention that the latest stable kernel had over 4,000 known bugs. "And the reason I mention '4.0' is that it would be a lovely time to do that," Torvalds Sunday. "Roughly a years heads-up that 'ok, after 3.19 (or whatever), we're doing a release with *just* fixes, and then that becomes 4.0'" Torvalds was initially concerned that a bug-fixing and stability release alone would not be of interest to developers, who would do new features instead.
If a once-fast computer has slowed to a crawl, you can't really blame the hardware. Sure, you may be able to improve speed by adding RAM, upgrading the CPU, or replacing the hard drive with an SSD. But none of those solutions--all of which cost money--address the underlying problem. Your hardware isn't underpowered. It's overloaded. Cleaning out Windows will very likely speed up a PC. And no, I'm not suggesting reinstalling the operating system. There are less drastic fixes.
appears to have drastically improved battery life, addressing one of the beefy tablet's biggest weak points. , web browsing on Wi-Fi jumped to 8.33 hours, compared to 6.68 hours before the firmware update. Video playback also got a boost, from 6.65 hours to 7.73 hours. yielded 8 hours and 51 minutes of battery life when cycling through web pages and still images. That's a 20 percent improvement over the 7 hours and 33 minutes achieved in the site's previous testing. lasted for about four or five hours on a charge, so a 75 percent improvement would put Surface Pro 2 battery life in the seven- to eight-hour range.
And lo, Batman rolled his rock up the hill of Gotham one more time, only to see Joker send it careening back towards the ground.
Historically, VirtualBox has been rock-solid, lightweight virtualization software that was only slightly less capable than its rival, VMware. Starting about a year and a half ago, VirtualBox became a bit less than that, acquiring new features, but becoming less reliable. Fortunately, the latest versions seem to have come back around, and 4.3 adds an important capability: support for touchscreens. I'm not a huge fan of fingerprints all over my screen, but as a user of tablets and smartphones I know it's part of the computing universe, and lots of folks like it. And with Windows 8.x designed for touch, it needs to be there in virtual environments. It is in VirtualBox and it worked well in my testing. Beyond the touch support, which is of course huge news, VirtualBox remains the quickest, least resource-hungry of the free virtual machine platforms. It basically stays out of the way when you're not running it, unlike others that spawn multiple services which are always present in the background. The other most user-recognizable improvements are support for IPv6 with VRDP, video capture support, and Webcam pass-thru. There's also SCSI CD-ROM emulation and a ton of bug fixes.
. mess things up. And yes, that includes some very vital things. Don’t swear off your courageous exploration just yet, though. Microsoft’s built a slew of granular controls into Windows that let you reset all sorts of individual aspects of the operating system. There’s usually no need to hit an irritating fly with that great, big "clean install" sledgehammer! Read this before you burn your installation to the ground and start all over. More than any other part of Windows, the Internet Explorer browser is most likely to suffer from excessive tinkering—especially if you’re the type of person who likes to install lots of free software, which all too often comes bundled with tacked-on toolbars and settings that hijack your homepage.
Security vendor McAfee says that small and midsize businesses are suffering from a false sense of security, basing their claims on a recent study conducted with Office Depot. Those who took part in the study showed a high degree of confidence that their data and devices were safe from attackers, despite industry research and evidence that proves otherwise. McAfee's claims come from the 1000 SMBs participated in the Office Depot Small Business Index in September. According to the data, 66 percent of the SMB owners who took part were confident that their data and devices were with 77 percent reporting that their organizations have never been attacked. According to the 2013 Verizon Business Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR), 40 percent of the incidents examined involved businesses with fewer than 1000 employees, and a majority of them were in the retail or food service industry. When asked for details, 80 percent of the respondents to Office Depot's survey admitted to not using data protection. Only about half of them confirmed that they're using email and Internet security measures. And almost all of them—91 percent—said they don't use endpoint or mobile device security. Yet, the frightening admission comes from the 14 percent of SMB owners who said they haven't of any kind in their environment.
Even those who don't like should consider it for its superior security as opposed to older Microsoft operating systems, if nothing else, the company says. According to its latest , machines running Windows XP are six times more likely to become infected than machines running Windows 8, the report says. The raw numbers are that 9.1 Windows XP machines need to be cleaned per 1000 versus 1.6 Windows 8 machines. The reason, Microsoft says, is that Windows XP's data execution prevention (DEP) is old and doesn't address modern threats as well as the defenses in Windows 8. "People figured out how to get around DEP as a mitigation," says Holly Stewart, program manager for Micrsoft's Malware Protection Center.
than you think. . I'm not sure if there's any other way to interpret his personality and perspective other than "I'm a douchebag." (Sorry, Twitter friend. Otherwise, I really like you.) Lest you think I'm just being judgmental and criticizing for no good reason, think about this experience: You're catching up on your social media feeds and see logo, logo, face belonging to someone you like, logo, a friend's face...then ugly chest hair. The more the profile picture shows up, the more jarring and aggravating it becomes. It's not just chest hair. I appreciate the human body much as the next person, but I don't really enjoy seeing random body parts like elbows or even breasts busting out of shirts to assault my eyes. You can't unsee some things.
founder of the world wide web, called on governments around the world to open up their data to the public in the same way that the U.K. is. The internet pioneer believes that releasing publicly held data to the public and software developers will help fight poverty, boost innovation, empower citizens, and reduce corruption. Speaking at the Open Government Partnership Summit in London recently, Berners-Lee revealed a report called the , which shows that the U.K. has the most advanced open data policy. The report, a joint project between the and Open Data Institute, is an investigation into how many countries are allowing open data policies.
Smartphone shipments grew by 9% in the third quarter, a record for a single quarter, which continues a record-setting trend, research firm IDC said.