"Privacy is dead—get over it," has been a mantra of private investigators for years. But continuing revelations about how many different ways personal privacy is still disappearing are still enough to unnerve people. It is not just about from the websites they visit, or from security cameras in public places. It is also about smart cars. It is about the cellular towers that serve their smartphones. And it is now also about their friendly brick-and-mortar retailer. One example of many is clothing retailer Nordstrom, which began tracking shoppers in its stores about a year ago . At least the company was somewhat transparent about it—it posted a sign telling customers what it was doing. But that generated enough complaints for it to end the program in May.
Google's faster-than-expected upgrade of all its SSL certificates to an RSA key length of 2048 bits will make cracking connections to the company's services more difficult without affecting performance, experts say. Google said last week the announced in May, was completed a month ahead of schedule and the company will start issuing the longer keys immediately. The upgrade started a couple of weeks before former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden sent the nation in shock with on Americans in its anti-terrorism program. Nevertheless, Google referred to government spying in announcing the upgrade's completion. "The deprecation of 1024-bit RSA is an industry-wide effort that we're happy to support, particularly light of concerns about overbroad government surveillance and other forms of unwanted intrusion," Dan Dulay, security engineer for Google, said in the company's blog.
Microsoft is whacking prices on Black Friday for its first-generation and Xbox consoles. While Microsoft has had a tough time putting a dent in Apple's tablet share, one thing for sure is that Microsoft will be . Microsoft's sneak peek of its (which seem to have been hidden again after making a brief appearance last week) showed a 32G Surface RT going for $199, $150 off the regular price (and $349 for the 64GB model). If you want a keyboard thrown in, Staples will have the 32G model available on Black Friday for $250. Microsoft is peddling a with an Intel Core i5 processor and 6GB of RAM for $399 ($450 off the usual price). A 14-inch Samsung Ultrabook and a 15.6-inch Gateway laptop will also feature big price cuts to be revealed as the week goes on.
Every few months it seems I get the same email pitch. Somebody wants to pay me to publish a link to their client’s site on one of my blogs. The client almost always turns out to be a casino. . He offered to write a 300-word guest post on any topic I wished and pay me up to $120 for it, so long as the post included a link to his client. When I asked who his client was, he told me point blank: GamingClub, an Australian online casino. . They were a bit cagier about whom they were representing, but a little Internet sleuthing revealed the name of their client: PartyBingo.com.
When Google announced plans in 2010 to jump into the broadband business, the company which promised gigabit-speed Internet at low prices or even free Internet for seven years if you chose a slower speed. As we head into 2014, Google has delivered super-fast Internet to exactly one place, in 2014. After that, who knows? Google has not released any further scheduling information. But if you're Verizon, Comcast, or AT&T, you might be breathing a little easier these days, knowing that Google apparently is not planning to buy up all that unused dark fiber and compete in the residential broadband market on a nationwide scale—at least for now.
Chip manufacturer Intel is embedding computers with technology that will allow online shoppers to pay for things by tapping a contactless card or an Near Field Communications (NFC)-enabled mobile phone against their PC or laptop. The breakthrough, which aims to provide a basis for secure and convenient e-commerce transactions, is being made possible following NXP's "PN544PC" NFC radio controller into a selection of new computers. The payment method will initially only be available to MasterCard customers as Intel has built the solution in conjunction with MasterCard's MasterPass contactless technology. Any transactions made using the new payment method will be verified by Intel's Identity Protection Technology (IPT).
Security vendor -based malware, signed malware, spam, and virtual currencies. Almost 700,000 new aimed at the Android platform were cataloged in the third quarter of the year, accounting for an increase of more than 30 percent. McAfee Labs claims this is driven at least partially by a new category of titled Exploit/MasterKey.A, which allows attackers to bypass the digital signature validation of applications, a key component of the Android security process. Researchers have also found a new class of Android malware that, once installed, downloads a second-stage payload without the user's knowledge.
Facebook executive Sheryl Sandberg said claims that the social media company is with teenagers have been greatly exaggerated. Despite reports that . "The vast majority of U.S. teens are on Facebook," Sandberg, the company's chief operating officer, said in the interview. "And the majority of U.S. teens use Facebook almost every day." Earlier this month, David Ebersman, Facebook's chief financial officer, stirred up a talk when he said, during the company's , that the social network is struggling to keep teenagers' attention.
Microsoft says the launch of the Xbox One on Friday has been the most successful yet for its Xbox gaming console family. The company sold 1 million consoles in less than 24 hours, it said, putting it roughly equal with the launch of a week earlier. Gamers on both platforms have been waiting several years for the companies to update their hardware, so strong sales at launch shouldn’t come as a surprise. “We are humbled and grateful for the excitement of Xbox fans around the world,” Microsoft said.
The FCC is scheduled to discuss the subject at its next public meeting on Dec. 12. If the agency adopts the rule, it will be up to airlines to install the onboard cells and decide the usage parameters.
Bitcoin scored several big wins this week, including endorsements from U.S. federal officials and Virgin Group founder Richard Branson, signalling its progress toward wider acceptance. Bitcoin has battled concerns about volatility, criminal use and potential government crackdowns, but people continue to in the virtual currency. It may still be a way from mass market acceptance, but developments over the past few days show it gaining support beyond enthusiasts, Libertarians and black market traders. On Monday, federal officials including the acting assistant attorney general at the Department of Justice argued that Bitcoin could and global commerce more broadly. But the anonymous nature of the currency, which makes it attractive for black market transactions, must be watched, they said. Some see Bitcoin more as an investment—if a potentially risky one—than a legal tender. On Friday a bitcoin was worth more than $800 on the Mt. Gox exchange, up from just $30 earlier this year. Bitcoin is managed and traded on a peer-to-peer network and is meant to be free of regulation by any central financial authority.
Betcha can’t watch it just once.
The impromptu-DJ service will have one final hurrah on December 2nd.
After 22 years, John Carmack has finally left the halls of Doom and Quake for greener, stereoscopic pastures.
Twitter has implemented new security measures that should make it much more difficult for anyone to eavesdrop on communications between its servers and users, and is calling on other Internet companies to follow its lead. . The technology should make it impossible for an organization to eavesdrop on encrypted traffic today and decrypt it at some point in the future. At present, the encryption between a user and the server is based around a secret key held on the server. The data exchange cannot be read but it can be recorded in its encrypted form. Because of the way the encryption works, it’s possible to decrypt the data at some point in the future should the server’s secret key ever be obtained. With perfect forward secrecy, the data encryption is based on two short-lived keys that cannot be later recovered even with the knowledge of the server key, so the data remains secure.
With a lull in major tech earnings news this week, Intel's investor day and Salesforce.com's Dreamforce developer and partner conference gave market watchers plenty to mull over. aiming to increase graphics and overall CPU performance as it tries to edge its way into an area dominated by rival ARM. The new, 64-bit Atom chips, however, are not likely to appear in smartphones and other mobile devices until 2015. Meanwhile, though company officials expect server chip sales to increase 9 percent next year, they also forecast a significant decline in revenue from chips for client machines. Essentially, the company is expected to be spending a lot of money before reaping expected rewards in the mobile arena in the 2016 timeframe. to essentially any company that wants advanced silicon. Up to now Intel has been doing contract manufacturing for only a handful of customers, so the move to expand the program will put it directly in competition with manufacturing giants such as Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. and GlobalFoundries.
Retailer Walmart will sell on Black Friday an $89 Hewlett-Packard Android tablet, one of many tablets available at massive discounts this holiday season in the U.S. . The Friday after the Thanksgiving holiday is one of the biggest shopping days in the U.S. Locations of Walmart retail outlets offering the product were not immediately available. A source familiar with the plan said the tablet will have an Atom chip code-named Medfield. Further product details were not available. Intel has said that its chips will power Android tablets starting at under $100. But the Medfield chip is not Intel's latest, and it does not deliver the applications or graphics performance of Intel's latest Atom tablet chip code-named Bay Trail.
HealthCare.gov, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' troubled insurance-shopping website, will double its user capacity by the end of the month in an effort to eliminate sluggish response times when thousands of people are on the site at the same time, officials said. The site should be able to handle 50,000 concurrent users by the end of November, and the tech team working on the site expects about 800,000 visits a day by then, said Jeffrey Zients, a former acting director at the White House Office of Management and Budget overseeing fixes to the site. The site now can handle about 25,000 users at a time before it slows down, although it was unstable at lower volumes in past weeks, he said Friday during a press briefing on the website's progress. The site was originally intended to handle about 50,000 concurrent users, but fell short in the first weeks of operation, Zients said. "It's important to keep in mind here that this is not a simple website," he added. "It's a complex system doing complicated work. This is much more than a website for browsing or conducting routine transactions."
SAP has been slapped with a lawsuit by California's state controller over a payroll software implementation the office says cost taxpayers a vast sum of money, but has never worked correctly. "After three years, and paying SAP approximately $50 million to integrate its own software into a new payroll and benefits system for the state of California, all the [state controller's office] has to show for its investment is a system that could not get the payroll right even once over an eight-month period for a pilot group of only 1,500 employees," the lawsuit states. The suit, filed Thursday in Sacramento County District Court, comes after a lengthy back-and-forth between the state and SAP over the system, which was supposed to serve 240,000 workers and replace 30-year-old legacy systems. , alleging that the vendor had failed to stabilize the system. It generated "significant errors" in payroll runs conducted during the pilot program, which centered on workers in Chiang's office, including "under or over-compensation of wages" and "failure to report contributions to retirement accounts," according to the suit.
With the National Security Agency spying on pretty much everyone inside and out of this country, we can't be too surprised, or offended, to find out that other countries are spying on us. Besides, the cloud is such a tempting target. , "strong evidence has emerged that the Chinese government is directing and executing a large-scale cyber espionage campaign against the United States." The 465-page report goes on to explain that these practices "may present cybersecurity risks for U.S. users and providers of cloud computing services." China's willingness to combine commerce with spying "represents a potential espionage threat to foreign companies that might use cloud computing services…the Chinese government one day may be able to access data centers outside China through Chinese data centers."
Stop wasting your bitcoin on hitmen and fly to space instead. Sir Richard Branson announced Friday customers can now pay for Virgin Galactic spaceflights in bitcoin.
Microsoft struggled this week with multiple performance problems on its Azure cloud platform, while it also made the hosted load balancing service Traffic Manager generally available. Microsoft's public cloud had a rough time over the past seven days, as the compute, management, SQL database and storage services were all affected. The storage service was the hardest hit, suffering a full service interruption that started at 10:22 p.m. UTC (Coordinated Universal Time) on Thursday and affected users in Asia, Europe and the U.S. Microsoft fixed the issue in about an hour. The problem seems to have had a knock-on effect on SQL database import and export functionality, whose performance was affected in the same regions at the same time. Microsoft didn't immediately reply to questions about what caused the problems, or if the company is doing anything to improve reliability. An outage that takes down a service across the world is considered serious.
is now on sale. from Google via the Google Play store, is a universal charging system that works with the Nexus 4, Nexus 5, and 2013 edition of the Nexus 7. The Wireless Charger was originally designed to ship alongside the new Nexus 5, which launched on October 31, but encountered a few delays. The Wireless Charger is a small (2.4-inches square) brick that connects via micro USB cable to a standard AC outlet (an adapter is included). The charger draws 9 watts of power. It's also magnetic, so when you drop your Nexus on top of the charging pad, it "snaps" into place, ensuring a solid alignment between the two devices, essential for getting a good charge. , designed solely for the Nexus 4, is no longer available for sale.
builds upon that (I swear version .04 is smoother than .03, though that may just be my anticipation of the upcoming 7.1). But more importantly, it also fixes a major security flaw that could have had users getting apps without actually being signed in to the store. Good for the users perhaps, but not so much for the vendors.
Google Apps now offers administrators more IT controls over Hangouts, the communications tool that includes IM, audio chats and video conferencing. . Apps administrators now have the ability to offer a partial set of Hangouts features to end users, instead of giving everybody full use of the tool. "Admins can now choose to limit Hangout chat messages to being internal-only, set chat history to off by default and decide whether users within the domain can contact each other without sending or accepting formal invitations first. Video and audio chat can also be turned off across the organization," wrote Ronald Ho, a Google Apps product manager, in a blog post.
International talks aimed at removing expensive international tariffs on IT products appear to have reached an impasse, with opposing negotiators blaming China for not budging from its position. Agreements to waive tariffs are designed to boost trade and ultimately make products cheaper for the consumer. More than 50 countries, representing 97 percent of the global IT trade, were involved in the talks in Geneva this week aimed at extending The World Trade Organization's Information Technology Agreement (ITA). Negotiators had hoped to reach an agreement this week, ahead of a ministerial level meeting of the World Trade Organisation in Bali at the beginning of December. The ITA was established in 1996 to do away with import tariffs on certain ICT products in order to stimulate trade. Many new devices are not covered by the ITA regime, prompting current efforts to add 250 products to the list of items covered. However, China disputed the inclusion of 141 of these, and demanded that 57 of them be excluded from the ITA altogether. .
The holidays may be a time for reconnecting with family, but long flights and the promise of plenty of unscheduled time make the temptation to bring work along irresistible. But the parade of planes, trains, and taxis—along with the highly coveted nature of laptops and mobile devices—put your data at immense risk. or leave your phone in a cab, and you may be looking for a new job come New Year’s. Follow these tips to secure your data while traveling this season and avoid a holiday horror story. The best way to make sure your data isn’t compromised if your laptop or mobile device is lost, stolen, or damaged is to not store your data on it in the first place. Instead, use cloud storage. You’ll be able to access your files from anywhere as long as you have an Internet connection (and, if the service offers offline access, even when you don’t). Box, DropBox, Google Drive, Microsoft SkyDrive, and Apple iCloud, all offer free cloud storage just for setting up an account. The last three also offer online productivity tools so you can create or edit content directly from the Web. And there are for specific needs like heightened security. In the event you do get separated from your device, at least you'll know your sensitive work files are safe.
AdBlock Plus from Eyeo is expanding its mission to clean up more than just annoying Flash ads. The browser add-on still blocks online ads—except for the —but ABP is now turning its attention to information overload on popular social networks. The latest social site to fall victim to ABP's editorial pen is YouTube, thanks to the new YouTube Customizer site. The feature helps you banish all the bits of the video site that annoy you, while keeping the ones you enjoy. To get started, you must have AdBlock Plus installed on Chrome, Firefox, or Opera. Next, just visit to start blocking YouTube's various "features." If you're generally annoyed with the current state of YouTube you can block everything but the video you're watching. The list of banished items includes comments, suggested videos, featured and recommended videos in the end screen, the sharing tab in the description, in-video annotations, and channel recommendations.
Just 48 percent of European Union Internet users surveyed several months ago had changed any of their online passwords during the past year, despite 76 percent believing that the risk of becoming a victim of cybercrime has increased. The survey, which was carried out by Eurobarometer in May and June, questioned more than 27,000 people. It found that 52 percent think they are not sufficiently informed about cybercrime risk. Only half of those surveyed said they used the Internet to shop or bank online. Those who do not reported that they were concerned about the misuse of personal data and the security of online payments. Of the survey respondents 12 percent have had a social media or email account hacked and seven percent have been the victim of credit card or banking fraud online.
With up to 100Mbps throughput, the A3 will load infotainment services faster and let up to 8 people connect to the Internet at the same time.
