Fulminantes Börsendebüt von Twitter: Der Aktienkurs des Online-Kurzmitteilungsdienstes legte am Donnerstag an der New Yorker Nyse um mehr als 70 Prozent zu und schloss bei 44,90 US-Dollar. Das vor sieben Jahren gegründete Unternehmen war an der Börse auf einen Schlag rund 25 Milliarden Dollar (18,5 Milliarden Euro) wert.
Die Enthüllungen von Ex-US-Geheimdienstmitarbeiter Edward Snowden haben Grossbritannien nach den Worten des Chefs des britischen Auslandsgeheimdienstes MI6 erheblichen Schaden zugefügt. "Sie haben unsere Operationen in Gefahr gebracht, unsere Gegner reiben sich vor Freude die Hände", sagte John Sawers am Donnerstag vor einem Parlamentsausschuss in London.
Die Aktie des Kurznachrichtendienstes Twitter ist zum Börsendebüt um über 75 Prozent in die Höhe geschossen. Im New Yorker Vormittagshandel startete das Papier mit 45,10 Dollar. Der Ausgabepreis für die 70 Millionen angebotenen Aktien hatte bei je 26 Dollar gelegen.
Der Chef der Deutschen Telekom, Rene Obermann, fordert nach der teuren Auktion von Mobilfunkfrequenzen in Österreich ein Umdenken in der Politik. "Was muss denn noch alles passieren, dass man seitens der Politik endlich aufwacht und erkennt, dass man so den Unternehmen die Basis für weitere Investitionen entzieht", sagte Obermann am Donnerstag laut Redetext.
Der weltgrösste Computerhersteller Lenovo dominiert die Konkurrenz dank seines erfolgreichen Einstiegs in die Smartphone-Welt. Von Juli bis September sprang der Gewinn um mehr als ein Drittel auf den Rekordwert von fast 220 Millionen Dollar (162,8 Millionen Euro), wie der chinesische Konzern am Donnerstag mitteilte.
An der milliardenschweren Kapitalspritze für den angeschlagenen Smartphone-Pionier Blackberry beteiligt sich Insiderinformationen zufolge auch Katar. Der Staatsfonds des Emirats zähle zu der Gruppe von Investoren, die in das kanadische Unternehmen eine Milliarde Dollar pumpen wollen, sagte eine mit den Plänen vertraute Person am Mittwoch.
Die iPhone-Erfinderin Apple will offenbar die Liste seiner Auftragshersteller weiter diversifizieren. Bislang vertraute Apple vor allem auf den Auftragshersteller Foxconn und dessen Mutterkonzern Hon Hai, dies soll sich in naher Zukunft aber ändern.
Der Pay-TV-Sender Sky Deutschland ist nach eigenen Angaben Opfer eines Datendiebstahls geworden. Kundendaten seien in die Hände Unbefugter gelangt, sagte ein Sprecher und bestätigte damit einen Bericht von "Spiegel Online". Wer dahinter stecke und wie die Unbekannten an die Daten gelangten, sei bisher nicht geklärt.
Urs Schaeppi, der Swisscom seit dem Tod von Konzernchef Carsten Schloter vor rund drei Monaten interimsmässig geleitet hat, ist nun definitiv zum Big Boss des Telekomriesen ernannt worden. Dies gab das Unternehmen heute früh bekannt.
Der Twitter-Börsengang macht viele Leute reich, zumindest auf dem Papier. Besitzer des Kurznachrichtendiensts sind neben den Gründern auch zahlreiche Investoren, die nach und nach Geld in das Unternehmen gesteckt haben, um es gross zu machen.
Here's our hands-on with EZgif.com, an easy, web-based tool for people with zero graphics know-how.
The sad march towards tribal fiefdoms continued Thursday, as Google announced that it will only allow Chrome for Windows users to download extensions hosted by Google’s own Chrome Web Store starting in January. Google says the decision to transform Chrome into a gated community stems from security concerns, in an echo of the official reason that Microsoft moved to the Windows Store model to distribute modern UI apps. Google engineering director Erik Kay points the finger at the damage caused by rogue extensions in a blog post detailing the lock-down. .
Android has a face only an engineer could love. At least, that's the reputation it has earned over the past few years. Google's mobile OS is a hotbed of mobile innovation and new technologies, but its interface doesn't have the friendly consumer-centric design of iOS or Windows Phone. With Android 4.4 KitKat, Google aims to address this shortcoming, while baking-in a handful of nifty new features. But the plastic surgery is incomplete. While iOS7 is easily identifiable by its flat bright colors and lightweight fonts, and Windows Phone carries on with Live Tiles, the KitKat interface has no single recongnizable trait. Yes, it's flatter and brighter, but what these days? Worse, the redesign seems pushed out the door too early. Scratch beneath the surface, and you'll find built-in apps and menus that haven't been udpated to the new look. There's a lot to like in Google's first name-branded OS release, but I can't help but this sweet treat isn't quite ready to be unwrapped. Here it is, Android users: your newly polished, flatter interface. Google did away with the technophile neon blue-and-black color scheme and adopted a lighter, whiter palette that looks and feels friendlier and borrows some of its look from competitors like Windows Phone 8 and iOS 7. Though I only used it on the speedy quad-core , screen-to-screen transitions in KitKat feel smoother than in previous versions of Android, and icons are bigger and more detailed. Even the application drawer feels like a big breath of fresh air; you can no longer peruse through widgets or jump into the Google Play store from there. Now if you want to add a widget, all you have to do is hold down on the Home screen to bring up a menu that lets you add widgets, customize the wallpaper, and choose your launcher. This action feels more intuitive than past versions, which require that you dig through the application drawer to do anything to the Home screen besides change the wallpaper. It's a perfect example of Google's minor design improvements.
Best known for its low-cost laptops, Acer doesn’t really inspire thoughts of premium products. But building high-end hardware could be the Taiwanese vendor’s best shot as it looks for a way to rescue its struggling business. With consumers flocking to tablets and smartphones, Acer’s once-thriving PC business has been left in the dust. Quarterly financial losses have become routine at the company, and its PC shipments declined more sharply in the past year than at any other major vendor, according to IDC. . amid the demand for mobile gadgets. And Windows 8 and Intel’s Ultrabook strategy have failed to resuscitate the market.
Jeri Ellsworth and Rick Johnson designed the CastAR for games, but the tech itself is innovative enough to change the field of wearable computing.
The U.S. Congress should take action to slow a skyrocketing number of “deceptive” patent- infringement demand letters sent from patent-licensing firms to small businesses, witnesses told a Senate committee. of the U.S. Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee Thursday. In many cases, the patent-demand letters have accused recipients of infringing “every-day technology” such as online shopping carts and Wi-Fi routers, said Julie Samuels, a senior staff attorney at the Electric Frontier Foundation. “These letters really had nothing to do with patent law,” she said. “They merely used the guise of patent law to conduct, frankly, run-of-the-mill extortion.” The PAE demand letters often don’t identity the owner of the patent or the patent the letter recipient is alleged to have infringed, said Mark Chandler, general counsel at Cisco Systems. Some PAEs are “charlatans, dressed up as innovators,” he said.
Thursday. The CIA pays the carrier more than $10 million annually for the data, including the date, duration, and numbers involved in a call, the Times said, citing unnamed government officials. The calls include ones that are made by customers of other carriers but travel partly on AT&T’s network. For calls with a U.S. participant, AT&T doesn’t tell the CIA the identity of the U.S. caller and masks several digits of the domestic number, the report said. The CIA isn’t allowed to conduct domestic spying. However, the agency can hand over the masked numbers to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which can subpoena AT&T for the uncensored data, the Times said. The FBI, in turn, sometimes shares information with the CIA about the U.S. participant in a call. of surveillance practices and rankled several U.S. allies.
The global market for PaaS (platform as a service) is set to leap from $3.8 billion last year to more than $14 billion in 2017 as companies look to cut infrastructure costs and speed up application development, according to newly released research from analyst firm IDC. Overall, the compound annual growth rate for PaaS during this period will be roughly 30 percent, compared to the 4 percent growth rate this year for IT spending overall, according to IDC. The expected rise in PaaS spending is due to "indications of faster acceptance of the competitive PaaS buying proposition and new information concerning past years, particularly related to the acceptance of and market penetration of Microsoft Azure," the report states. IDC breaks PaaS into a number of sub-segments, including APaaS (application platform as a service), DPaaS (database platform as a service), cloud-based test and IPaaS (integration platform as a service).
Whatever you think of their products, there’s one segment where Microsoft has unquestionably led: advertising. Ane—the bizarre, wonderful anime that Microsoft has put together for Internet Explorer—falls squarely in that category. Meet Inori Aizawa, the “anime personification” of Internet Explorer. Inori has her own , which appeared at the end of October, during the AFA13 conference in Singapore. A screencap of the anime is credited to “Zi Rong and Team CACANi.” “When I was younger, I used to be a clumsy, slow, and awkward girl,” “Aizawa” says. “However, just like the story of ugly duckling, people told me that I have really matured and changed over the years. I feel confident in my abilities now, and I’m eager to show you what I can do.” The Verge describes over the past few years, which has been mostly confined to its Asian customers.
The twin titans of the Android input app world both announced big upgrades today. SwiftKey 4.3 has exited beta, consolidating what were previously two separate apps into a single application. Simultaneously, Swype 1.6, a new version of the app studded with new features, has been released. The enhancements to both are considerable, renewing the battle over which app is the best system for entering text into your Android device. If you're unfamiliar with SwiftKey or Swype, both are based on "swiping" to enter text instead of tapping on individual characters. This means you don't have to physically lift your finger up to go from one letter to the next. You just drag your digit from character to character as fast as you can. This tends to make most users faster and more accurate when writing messages, and both systems include predictive logic that makes educated guesses about the words and phrases you're spelling out to improve speed further. a lot, SwiftKey will pick up on this immediately, saving you a lot of spelling angst. , which includes additional logic that recognizes commonly used Canadian places and figureheads.
YiYing Lu, the artist whose design became known as the Twitter "fail whale," creates an illustration to describe the Twitter IPO.
The Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI) implementation found in motherboards from server manufacturer Supermicro suffers from serious vulnerabilities that could allow attackers to remotely compromise the management controllers in servers that use them. The IPMI specification was developed by Intel and allows system administrators to manage and monitor computer systems remotely in the absence of physical access to them. IPMI supports multiple-communication protocols and operates independently of the operating system running on the computer. Its central part is a microcontroller called the Baseboard Management Controller (BMC) that is usually embedded into the motherboard and is directly connected to its southbridge and a variety of sensors. BMCs are essentially computers that run inside other computers, most commonly servers. They are usually based on ARM chips and run Linux-based firmware that implements the IPMI functions including monitoring, rebooting and reinstalling the host server’s OS. IPMI implementations vary from vendor to vendor, but most expose a web-based management interface, a command-line interface via Telnet or Secure Shell, and the IPMI network protocol on port 623 UDP or TCP.
will stop working by the end of 2013, your precious VoIP investments are no longer in jeopardy—for now. People who use Skype with third-party instant messaging clients are staring at a far bleaker future, however. In July, Skype announced that it planned to kill its desktop application programming interface (API) later this year, which would cause third-party peripherals and software to stop working properly. The long-lived and widely utilized desktop API simply doesn’t play nicely with the Skype of today, the company argued; it doesn’t function on the growing ranks of non-PC devices. As such, Skype wanted to kill the API and force developers to shift to the company’s more limited uniform resource identifier (URI) technology, which works across all platforms.
More than a month after it went live, a couple of large questions remain about the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ botched launch of HealthCare.gov. The problems with the insurance-shopping website include outages, slow page loads and the inability of users to complete coverage applications. Some insurance providers say they have been receiving inaccurate application information from the website. The problems appear related to a number of factors, but HHS officials have talked little about the specific technology problems. are running their own health insurance marketplace websites, while 34 states, including Texas, Florida, Pennsylvania and New Jersey, opted to be part of the HealthCare.gov marketplace.
A French court has ordered Google to block from its search results pictures of former Formula One motor racing president Max Mosley participating in a sado-masochistic sex party with five women. Google’s lawyers are still studying Wednesday’s ruling and plan to appeal. They say the Paris High Court wants the company to build a censorship machine. The pictures were initially published under the headline “F1 BOSS HAS SICK NAZI ORGY WITH 5 HOOKERS” on March 30, 2008, by now-defunct British newspaper News of the World, which paid one of the women to record the event using a hidden video camera. A that, while the video showed participants speaking German and wearing modern German military uniforms or playing the role of prisoners, there was no evidence of a Nazi theme. In the same ruling, the High Court of England and Wales found that the newspaper had infringed Mosley’s right to privacy and awarded him £60,000 (then $120,000) in damages.
Unless you're a Wall Street investor or an early Twitter employee, Twitter's IPO is a whole lot of meaningless hype.
You don’t need an office to get things done. In fact, according to a , telecommuting can make you significantly more productive than spending a day at the corporate headquarters. And it’s not just about the 9 to 5 anymore. Flexible hours and more demanding schedules mean we need to be productive at any time, anywhere, and collaborate with people across multiple time zones. Whether you’re at home, a hotel, a coffee shop, or an airport, great work requires great habits, and a reliable personal cloud of data and services when and where you work. In today’s world of flexible hours, mobility, and remote collaboration, staying effective requires smart productivity practices. That means keeping a clear head and staying focused by paying close attention to four spheres of productivity: 1) Right space 2) Right tools
Facebook is moving to bigger offices in London and Dublin to accommodate its rapidly expanding European workforce. Thursday. “We started pretty small, but now there are hundreds of Facebook people working hard to keep the service running,” she said. Nicola Mendelsohn, Facebook’s vice president of EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa), on her Facebook page Thursday. The office is not finished yet though, she added.
Lookout is one of the most popular Android antimalware apps around, but is bloatware really the answer to the (somewhat overhyped) Android security scourge?
Fuzzy search makes it better at guessing what you're saying, but it still can't compare to the voice features on iPhones and Android phones.
Microsoft released its Internet Explorer 11 browser for Windows 7 on Thursday, providing a nominal speed boost versus IE10, including performance-enhancing technologies such as pre-rendering and pre-fetching. Although users can automatically download a copy of IE11 (shown above) for Windows 7 from the Microsoft website, Microsoft said that it would automatically upgrade users over the next few weeks, beginning first with those running the . Overall, Microsoft claims that users who do so will see a 9 percent performance improvement versus IE10, which Microsoft claims is about 30 percent faster than competing browsers. IE11 ships with the new Chakra just-in-time Java compiler, designed to improve the performance of real-world websites, plus support for different components of the ECMAScript6 standard. IE11 also offloads WebGL graphics processing onto the GPU, reducing CPU power consumption and improving performance. Microsoft also improved its compliance with Web standards, including processing HTML5 video without the need for plugins.
. is also promising some big new features in the coming months. The basic structure of Mega is still the same. You have a navigation panel on the left, a main viewing area to check out files, and buttons above the main viewing area for common tasks such as file uploads and new folders. At the top of the navigation panel, however, you now have quick links to the trash folder (called the Rubbish bin in Mega's ye olde English), contacts, and your inbox to receive new files from other Mega users.
You almost certainly have two versions of Flash running at the same time. They tend to trip over each other. I know; I've suffered from that same problem myself. Here's the problem: Chrome comes with its own version of Flash. In addition, you may have another Flash installation, downloaded from Adobe or bundled with your computer. The trick is to turn one of them off.
Sony just announced its lineup of PlayStation launch day entertainment apps, but music fans will find themselves suffering in silence.
: There’s a new graphics card champion in town. On Thursday, Nvidia finally took the wraps off the GeForce GTX 780 Ti, a $700 beast with the heart of a GTX Titan—but a much more palatable (though still enthusiast-only) price. , it’s built from Nvidia’s high-end GK110 graphics processing unit, sporting an 875MHz core clock, 3GB of memory, and more ROPS, TMUs, and CUDA cores than you can shake a stick at. . .)
Adobe Systems has added mobile features to its Marketing Cloud, allowing companies to better target smartphones with the help of geolocation and app analytics. Today’s marketing departments must think “mobile first,” according to Adobe. The reason is that users spend four times more time on their favorite apps than browsing the Web, the company said. The new capabilities have been integrated into the Marketing Cloud’s Analytics and Target tools, and users who license them get access to the mobile features at no extra charge. Next year they will be extended to Marketing Cloud’s Campaign and Experience Manager tools.
The ongoing revelations of governmental electronic spying point to a problem larger than National Security Agency malfeasance, or even of security weaknesses. Rather the controversy arising from Edward Snowden's leaked documents suggest we face unresolved issues around data ownership, argued security expert . "Fundamentally, this is a debate about data sharing, about surveillance as a business model, about the dichotomy of the societal benefits of big data versus the individual risks of personal data," Schneier told attendees of the Usenix LISA (Large Installation System Administration Conference), being held in Washington this week. "We might not buy [it], but the basic NSA argument is 'You must give us your data because it is keeping you safe.'" Schneier has been an of the NSA since Snowden, a former NSA contractor, first leaked documents showing the many ways in which the intelligence agency had tapped into the Internet and data centers to collect data en masse about people's activities.
The Silk Road online marketplace has resurfaced about a month after U.S. officials shut down the website that was only accessible through the Tor anonymity service, and arrested among others a man named Ross William Ulbricht, who was alleged to be the site's owner and operator. The site has been relaunched by a person styling himself as Dread Pirate Roberts, a handle linked to Ulbricht by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation. Before its closure, the Silk Road was associated with the illegal sale and distribution of drugs and other illegal items including fake passports, the FBI said in a complaint in September. "It is with great joy that I announce the next chapter of our journey. Silk Road has risen from the ashes......" Dread Pirate Roberts wrote in a note on the new website which could be accessed through the Tor service. Dread Pirate Roberts cautioned that the site was still in early phases of development and lacked some of the features of its predecessor. Security appears to be the focus of the website. It promises to encourage and reward users who report both theoretical and even proven exploits.
A guard dog is only as valuable as the alarms he sounds. The latest version of WinPatrol, a handy security utility that serves as a virtual guard dog for your PC, drives this point home. WinPatrol 2013 still alerts you when changes are made to your PC, but does so less frequently...so when it does bark, you sit up and take notice. WinPatrol is available in a free version, which offers a handful of ways to monitor just what's going on on your PC. You can see a list of startup programs, which you can choose to disable or delay. You also can see a list of recently used programs, hidden files, file types by associated program, active tasks and services, and much more. The latest version of WinPatrol looks the same as ever, a drab gray design weighed down by a lot of text. But it does feature an improved alert system: WinPatrol no longer notifies you as to every tiny change made on your PC. Instead, WinPatrol barks (and yes, it actually barks) only when your attention is needed. For example, past versions would notify you when a legitimate program was added to your Startup program list. The latest version will notify you when a higher level of activity—typically signifying some sort of malicious intent—is detected. WinPatrol also now has the ability to learn from your responses: when you tell the program that you approve of an application's actions, it won't alert you about that action again.
Chinese PC maker Lenovo posted a 36 percent year-over-year growth in its net profit in the third quarter, with demand for the company's smartphones and tablets continuing to outpace shipments for its PC products. For its fiscal second quarter ended Sept. 30, the company's net profit reached $220 million, an increase from $162 million for the same period a year ago. Revenue was also up 13 percent year-over-year, at $9.8 billion. Lenovo reported the strong earnings even as demand for PC products has fallen sharply. Shipments for Lenovo PCs barely grew at 2.2 percent year-over-year in the quarter, according to research firm IDC. Rivals including HP, Dell and Acer, reported flat growth or major declines in shipments. those of its PCs. The company's mobile and home products business, which includes smart TVs, now makes up 15 percent of its total revenue.