Der spanische Telko Telefónica ist Gerüchten zufolge an Akquisitionen auf dem lateinamerikanischen Markt interessiert. Ins Visier der Telefónica ist insbesondere das Land Mexiko geraten. Spaniens grösster Telekommunikationsnetzbetreiber will die Dominanz von Carlos Slim brechen. Es werden bereits Gespräche mit dem eher kleinen Mobilfunkanbieter Grupo Iusacell S.A. sowie dem Pay-TV-Anbieter Grupo Televisa S.A.B. geführt.
Mit Fiberlink Communications hat der US-IT-Riese IBM ein weiteres Technologieunternehmen übernommen. Fiberlink ist ein Anbieter von Mobile Device Management-, Application Management-, und Expense Management-Lösungen.
Nachdem Yahoo! in den vergangenen Tagen wegen seines Mitarbeiter-Ranking-Systems vermehrt in der Kritik stand, soll mit dem Abgang des bisherigen CEOs Steve Ballmer auch das bisherige Mitarbeiter-Ranking-System begraben werden.
Die italienische Staatsanwaltschaft ermittelt nach Angaben aus Justizkreisen gegen Apple wegen mutmasslichen Steuerbetrugs in Höhe von einer Milliarde Euro. „Die Apple-Ermittlungen laufen“, sagte ein mit dem Vorgang vertrauter Insider gegenüber der Nachrichtenagentur Reuters. Einzelheiten nannte er nicht.
Reisende in Europa sollen künftig umfangreicher als bisher elektronische Geräte wie Smartphones oder Tabletcomputer an Bord von Flugzeugen nutzen dürfen. Die Europäische Flugsicherheitsagentur (Easa) in Köln teilte mit, bis zum Monatsende entsprechende neue Richtlinien für die Nutzung der Geräte auf Flügen veröffentlichen zu wollen.
Das Testprogramm für die Computerbrille Google Glass steht vor der nächsten Ausweitung. Der Internetkonzern schaltete heute eine offene Warteliste frei. In einer ersten Runde hatten rund 10.000 Nutzer Google Glass zur Probe erhalten. Dann wurde jedem von ihnen erlaubt, bis zu drei weitere Leute einzuladen. Mit einem offiziellen Marktstart wird bisher nicht vor dem kommenden Jahr gerechnet.
In der Schweiz verbreitet sich eine Schadsoftware. Der Virus verschlüsselt auf den infizierten Computern die Dateien, die sich darauf befinden. Die Experten des Bundes warnen davor, den Forderungen der Internetkriminellen nachzukommen.
Die Urner, Nidwaldner und Obwaldner Kantonalbank haben sich zusammengetan, um ihre Personalprozesse mithilfe einer für alle drei Finanzinstitute einheitlichen Lösung zu harmonisieren und auf den neuesten Stand zu bringen. Zum Einsatz kommen Produkte der Xpert.HRM-Familie der Schwerzenbacher Software-Herstellerin Soreco, welche durch Lehmann + Partner Informatik bei den drei Banken eingeführt werden.
Der Bundesrat hat entschieden, dass die Bundesverwaltung für die elektronische Geschäftsverwaltung (Gever) künftig nur noch zwei Produkte einsetzen wird. Die Bundeskanzlei werde die Beschaffung der beiden Gever-Produkte zusammen mit den Departementen durchführen, heisst es in einem heute verschickten Communiqué.
Die deutsche Regierung einigte sich am Dienstag darauf, dass Suchmaschinen wie Google künftig Suchergebnisse "diskriminierungsfrei" anzeigen müssen. Damit dürfen sie etwa keine eigenen Reiseportale oder zahlende Kunden bei der Anzeige von Suchergebnissen mehr bevorzugen. Dies gilt als ein Geschäftsmodell großer Suchmaschinen. Wie Google und Co dazu gebracht werden sollen, ist jedoch nicht klar.
Do you enjoy dying over, and over, and over again? You're in luck!
AMD Wednesday promised a 2013 roadmap that pushes power consumption down to the level of rival Intel’s latest Atom chips. The company also added dedicated security features that address how corporate workers bringing personal devices into a business environment. The three pillars of AMD’s mobile roadmap will be three chips: “Kaveri,” AMD’s first chip designed for heterogenous computing; “Beema,” a low-power chip that adds the security processor; and “Mullins,” another security-enhanced chip that drops power down into the 2-watt range. All three are technically APUs, combining CPU and graphics logic. All three are designed for the convergence of PCs and tablets, where mobility and low power are prized as highly or more so than traditional performance metrics, said Gabe Gravning, AMD’s director of client marketing. ”I think it’s clear to everybody that there’s an inflection point in the market,” Gravning said. “2014 will be a shakeout year for form factors,” where the market collectively decides what computing devices they’ll want to carry around for the next few years, he said.
Cisco Systems missed its revenue forecast and logged a year-over-year profit decline in its fiscal first quarter. The rare miss for the networking giant, considered one of the bellwethers of the technology industry, came after during its last financial report in August. At that time, the company cited uneven economic conditions in some parts of the world and a streamlining of its organization. “While our revenue growth was below our expectation, our financials are strong, our strategy is strong and our innovation engine is executing extremely well,” Chairman and CEO John Chambers said in a press release. The company reported $12.1 billion in revenue, which fell short of the consensus of analysts polled by Thomson Financial, who had expected $12.36 billion.
Dropbox is hoping to capitalize on the growing use of its file-hosting service among businesses with a new product built from scratch that is designed to help companies improve workflow processes. The company on Wednesday announced Dropbox for Business, a paid service that provides Dropbox’s bread-and-butter file hosting, but with a smorgasbord of additional features geared toward business users such as sharing restrictions and IT management controls, to help keep data safe. to offer enterprise-level file hosting. Amazon also on Wednesday announced its WorkSpaces product for desktop computing in the cloud. Dropbox’s new service is designed to simplify how businesses usually share and transfer work files, by eliminating the need to resort to FTP (File Transfer Protocol), outside servers, and to also eliminate the security risks that come with USB thumb drives and email attachments.
Ominous rumblings rumbled this morning, as from store shelves and stored them in secure warehouse locations, “effective immediately.” The laptop disappeared from Amazon’s online shelves, too, as well as from HP and Google’s own web stores. Something was afoot, and we now know what that something is: The micro-USB charger that shipped with the HP Chromebook 11 is faulty, and some have been damaged after over-heating during use. Here’s the full text of what Google PR passed along when PCWorld asked for a comment from Caesar Sengupta, VP of Product Management: That defect’s a whole lot worse than , is still being sold.
More than 106,000 U.S. residents have selected health-insurance plans, but only 27,000 did so through the flawed HealthCare.gov, during the first month of enrollment through the U.S. government’s Affordable Care Act. About 79,000 of the 106,000 enrollments in health-insurance plans came through insurance marketplaces run by 15 states, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. HealthCare.gov, the malfunctioning website that launched Oct. 1, allows residents of other states to enroll in new health coverage. Officials in President Barack Obama’s administration have been saying they expected low enrollment numbers in the first weeks after enrollments began, based on the experience of Massachusetts, which has a similar health-insurance program. With an estimated 47 million U.S. residents without health insurance, the number of enrollees so far represents a small fraction of those eligible for health insurance under the so-called Obamacare law passed in 2010. Residents who want health insurance to start Jan. 1 must sign up by Dec. 15, but open enrollment in the new plans extends into March.
While the impact of Apple’s iPhone is obvious to anyone who follows the tech industry, attorneys Wednesday took a California jury back to the phone’s 2007 unveiling to remind them just how important the device was, as Apple and Samsung began arguing over patent infringement damages that could run into hundreds of millions of dollars. “Where were you on Jan. 9, 2007?” asked Harold McElhinny, a lawyer at Morrison & Foerster representing Apple, before cueing a video of the late Apple CEO . “An iPod, a phone and an Internet communicator,” Jobs said that day as the crowd cheered in response. For Apple, it’s important to remind the eight-member jury and assert just how influential the iPhone was to the industry, because Apple is seeking redress for Samsung’s infringement of five of its patents on 13 different Samsung smartphones.
Now we know the real reason that executives need their own private offices. They're enjoying porn on company equipment. But that's not even the worst executive habit to bring malware into corporate environments. the results of a survey of 200 United States-based corporate malware analysts. "Among the issues that malware analysts face: more than half said they’ve had to remove malware from the device of a member of senior leadership because the executive clicked on a malicious link in a phishing e-mail, while nearly 40% had to remove malware after a senior executive visited an infected pornographic website." The survey was conducted last month by Opinion Matters on behalf of ThreatTrack Security. The numbers are striking enough to make you wonder about the average intelligence of our country's highest-paid employees. A full 56 percent of those surveyed reported that they had removed a malware infection caused by a top executive clicking on a link in a phishing email. Other common upper-management mistakes include plugging an infected device into a PC (47 percent), letting a family member use a company computer (45 percent), visiting a pornographic Web site (40 percent), and installing a malicious app (33 percent).
The idea is sound and the form factor is fascinating, but the GameStick is simply not worth your time.
New features in Sony's upcoming gaming console will make it easier for users to stream games and share content over social media.
Top IT officials from U.S. President Barack Obama’s administration insisted HealthCare.gov is as secure as possible, despite questions raised from inside the government before the flawed website’s launch. from Tony Trenkle, CIO at the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), raised six security concerns, including two open high-priority problems, less than a month before the agency launched HealthCare.gov, Republican critics of the Obama administration noted Wednesday. Republicans also pointed to a Sept. 13 CMS memo saying security vendor Mitre was unable to complete end-to-end security testing of the health-insurance website. CMS officials are still “ignoring” integrated security testing requirements for the website, said Representative Darrell Issa, a California Republican and chairman of the U.S. House of Representatives Oversight and Government Reform Committee. “On the day of the launch, and even today, there are material failures in the security of the Obamacare website,” Issa said during a committee hearing. “Hackers may have already, or may soon, find those vulnerabilities.”
Private clouds offer “none of the benefits” of a robust public cloud, and are only a stopgap solution perpetuated by “old-guard” IT companies such as IBM, said Andy Jassy, Amazon senior vice president who heads up Amazon Web Services. “If you’re not planning on using the public cloud in some significant fashion, you will be at a significant competitive disadvantage,” Jassy told a packed auditorium of nearly 9,000 IT pros Wednesday in Las Vegas, for the opening keynote of the AWS Reinvent conference. Jassy split his time between extolling the benefits of using large public clouds such as Amazon’s and introducing new services.
work for URLs protected by HTTPS. . “I believe the best way that we can meet the goal of increasing use of TLS [Transport Layer Security] on the Web is to encourage its use by only using HTTP/2.0 with https:// URIs,” Nottingham wrote.
Adobe Systems released security updates for Flash Player, AIR and ColdFusion to fix critical vulnerabilities that could allow attackers to take control of affected systems or read information from servers without authorization. The updates for Flash Player and Adobe AIR, an Internet rich application runtime with Flash support, fix two memory corruption vulnerabilities that could lead to remote code execution. Adobe recommends that users update to Flash Player version 11.9.900.152 for Windows and Mac and version 11.2.202.327 for Linux. The Flash Player version bundled with Google Chrome, Internet Explorer 10 on Windows 8 and Internet Explorer 11 on Windows 8.1 will be automatically updated through the update mechanisms of those browsers, the company said in . Windows, Mac, and Android users of Adobe AIR and Adobe AIR SDK (software development kit) should update to version 3.9.0.1210 of those programs.
Retailers are spending big on iPads and other tablets in a bid to increase efficiency and enhance the in-store shopping experience. But with new opportunities come potential pitfalls. Here’s how to handle the most common ones. The big retail splurge on tablets has enabled companies to quickly check stock, take payments, and even view store sales performance. But one of the early problems retailers have had to counter is how their employees misuse these devices. and by utilizing a Mobile Device Management Solution. “Time wasting on tablets is a potential problem if retail employees are given a tablet with full internet access to use,” says Ovum analyst Richard Absalom. “We think that this issue is best dealt with through HR policies and a performance review system—you can see if performance is suffering and act accordingly, not necessarily using a technology solution. However, if retailers do want to put controls in place, using an MDM client can monitor device usage and log activity.”
Even after obtaining the encryption keys from secure email provider Lavabit through a court, the government was prevented by the court order and various laws from accessing other Lavabit users’ accounts, the U.S. Department of Justice said Tuesday in a filing in an appeal by Lavabit. The government said in the filing in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit that the information it wanted from a single unnamed account was user log-in information and the date, time, and duration of the email transmissions, and dismissed Lavabit’s “parade of hypotheticals” regarding unlawful actions the government could take. “Were a government officer to do as Lavabit fears and ‘rummage’ through other users’ communications without authorization, that would be a crime,” DOJ wrote. Lavabit shut down in August citing an ongoing legal battle it was not allowed to discuss at the point. Founder Ladar Levison said he was shutting down the secure email service rather than become “complicit in crimes against the American people.” The government is said to have been looking for email information of former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, who since June disclosed through newspapers certain documents about surveillance programs by the U.S. National Security Agency. The target user name has been redacted in the Lavabit records.
Microsoft patched serious vulnerabilities Tuesday in Windows, Internet Explorer and Office, but also urged customers to stop using the aging RC4 cipher and SHA-1 hashing function in their systems and services. These algorithms have known weaknesses and should be replaced with more secure alternatives in SSL deployments and digital certificates. for Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows RT, Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows Server 2012 that allows system administrators to disable RC4 using registry settings. The update also adds a SCH_USE_STRONG_CRYPTO flag that allows developers to remove RC4 support in their Internet applications that use the Windows Secure Channel (Schannel) library. , but this requires customers to enable support for TLS 1.2 in their services.
The first wave of PlayStation reviews are out, and the evaluations are a work in progress.
A coalition of photographers and picture agencies has made a formal complaint to Europe’s competition watchdog about Google’s use of third-party images. CEPIC, the Center of the Picture Industry, submitted the formal antitrust complaint to the European Commission, alleging the search giant uses images without the rights holders’ consent and is fuelling online piracy. “Since the redesign of Google Images in January 2013, the situation got worse,” said CEPIC in a statement on Wednesday. Google now presents images in full size and high resolution on its website. This enables users to download images without having to visit the website hosting the image, according to the group. Also, Google does not inform users properly about copyright protection, the group said. CEPIC says Google’s exploitation of third-party images is an abuse of a dominant market position under European Union laws and that it is exploiting piracy for its own profit.
Recognizing how organizations need to produce and update their software more quickly, Microsoft has added an array of services around its Visual Studio IDE (integrated development environment) to help developers update and manage their software after it goes into production. , the company also introduced during the launch in New York a package of services called Visual Studio Online. Visual Studio Online provides a way to keep track of an application once it has gone live, or into full production usage. It allows teams of developers to collaborate online. It also offers a lightweight browser based IDE for making quick changes to Web applications running on Microsoft’s Windows Azure cloud. With these services, “We will allow organizations to be more agile, deliver faster and deliver what people actually want,” said Microsoft Technical Fellow Brian Harry.
Microsoft has joined forces with development platform vendor Xamarin to make it easier for Windows developers to create cross-platform apps for smartphones, tablets and PCs. The partnership was announced at the launch of Visual Studio 2013, which took place at an event in New York on Wednesday. The most important part of the partnership is a technical collaboration to better integrate Xamarin’s technology with Microsoft’s developer tools and services, including Visual Studio 2013. The goal is to make it easier for C# developers to share code when building native apps for iOS, Android, Mac OS and Windows. Xamarin has implemented APIs for both iOS and Android, so anything that can be done in Objective-C or Java can be done in C# using its tools, according to the company.
More like a tower OFFENSE game, am I right folks? ...Anyone?
Microsoft is abandoning a ranking system that has been blamed for hampering innovation and pitting employees against one another. Employees learned of the move in an email from Lisa Brummel, Microsoft’s executive vice president of human resources, on Tuesday. The system, known as “stack ranking,” has become emblematic of much that is wrong with Microsoft’s corporate culture. , “Microsoft’s Downfall: Inside the Executive E-mails and Cannibalistic Culture That Felled a Tech Giant,” published in June last year.
Chinese search giant Baidu is facing a chorus of complaints for allegedly stealing online video content from rivals, resulting in a 300 million yuan ($48.9 million) lawsuit against the Internet company. Four online video providers in China, including Youku Tudou, Sohu and Tencent, said on Wednesday they had filed the legal action, and accused Baidu of promoting online piracy. Joining them in the suit was the Motion Picture Association of America and Dalian Wanda Group, a major Chinese entertainment and film company. “Under this situation, we really will have no way to compete,” said Sohu CEO Charles Zhang in a press conference. “We’ve spent so much money buying online content, but half of our user traffic goes to Baidu video.” Known as the country’s largest search engine, Baidu also runs services that host online video for PC and smartphone users. But many of these videos are sourced from rival sites that are paying millions of dollars in Internet bandwidth costs and copyright licenses, Baidu’s competitors alleged.
Those who cannot retrieve their digital history are doomed to repeat it, and that’s why preserving your saved games should be a regular part of any gamer’s backup strategy. Few computer catastrophes cut as deeply as the pain you’ll feel if you lose your hard-earned level progress or that killer +20 bastard sword of unholy smiting just because you move to new hardware or your hard drive gives up the ghost. You face a couple of challenges, however: Games don’t have a big, red ‘BACK UP’ button, and there’s no standard location for saved games—files can be strewn far and wide across numerous folders. What’s a cautious gamer to do? Fear not! This guide will have you storing your saves in no time, and with minimal hassle. Don’t go diving too deeply into the weeds just yet. If you rely on Steam for your gaming goodness, as many PC enthusiasts do, your saves might already be ensconced within the great gigs of the sky. Some—but not all—Steam games utilize a service-specific feature dubbed “Steam Cloud.” Developers can have Steam Cloud automatically keep game saves and settings preferences on Valve’s servers, allowing you to access them from any PC.