Anlässlich der eidgenössischen Volksabstimmung vom 24. November 2013 haben zwölf Kantone Versuche mit der elektronischen Stimmabgabe durchgeführt. Diese haben laut Mitteilung des Bundes erfolgreich verlaufen. Von den rund 158.000 Stimmberechtigten, die ihre Stimme via Internet hätten abgeben können, haben demnach 24.486 ihre Stimme elektronisch eingelegt.
Der chinesische Hersteller Lenovo, derzeit Weltmarktführer im PC-Geschäft, steigt ins Smartphone-Geschäft in Deutschland ein. Das sagte Deutschland-Chef Stefan Engel dem „Handelsblatt“ (Montag-Ausgabe). Bisher verkauft der Konzern seine Geräte nur auf dem Heimatmarkt China und in einigen Schwellenländern wie Indonesien und Russland.
Der neue Swisscom-Konzernchef Urs Schaeppi ist ins Visier der Steuerbehörden geraten. Obwohl er sein Wohneigentum in Kehrsatz BE behielt, hat Schaeppi 2009 sein Steuerdomizil ins steuergünstige Zug verlegt, nun kehrt er zurück.
Die Onlineenzyklopädie Wikipedia will ihr Regelwerk straffen und verständlicher gestalten. Als Ziele nannte der massgeblich daran beteiligte Sozialwissenschaftler Dirk Franke die Eindämmung von PR-Einflüssen und eine bessere Streitkultur.
Die deutsche Gewerkschaft Verdi will eine grosse Angebotswoche des Online-Einzelhändler Amazon in Deutschlands mit Streiks stören. Es werde in der nächsten Woche zu Arbeitsniederlegungen kommen, sagte ein Gewerkschaftssprecher der „Frankfurter Allgemeinen Zeitung“. „Wir werden es richtig krachen lassen“, hiess es laut einem Bericht aus Gewerkschaftskreisen.
Im WTC Zürich Oerlikon ging dieser Tage das vierte Studerus Technology Forum statt. Der ICT-Weiterbildungsevent, welcher von der in Schwerzenbach Zürich ansässigen Studerus ausgerichtet wird, fand dieses Jahr bereits zum vierten Mal statt und widmete sich aktuellen Trends in den Bereichen Wireless-LAN, Security, Switch und LTE.
Die Hochschule für Wirtschaft FHNW arbeitet am EU-Projekt "Learn PAd"mit. Dabei handelt es sich um eine E-Learning-Plattform, die Öffentliche Verwaltungen bei der Optimierung der Geschäftsprozesse unterstützen soll. Neben der FHNW arbeiten auch die Universitäten von L'Aquila und Camerino (Italien), verschiedene Unternehmen aus Frankreich, Italien, Österreich und Litauen sowie eine Öffentliche Verwaltung aus Italien am Projekt mit.
Bitwall will die Bezahlschranken für Online-Nachrichtenartikel revolutionieren. Webseiten, die Paywalls installieren, können Lesern auf verschiedene Weise Zugang gewähren: Sie können mit der virtuellen Internetwährung Bitcoin bezahlen und entweder einen ganzen Tag lang Zugriff auf die ganze Seite bekommen oder nur für einen Artikel bezahlen. Auch sind der Konsum von Werbung sowie das Teilen der Story auf Twitter möglich.
Kein Tablet ist so erfolgreich wie Apples iPad. Doch ist das Tablet Spektrum breit gefächert, so werden auch preisgünstigere Modelle von Rivalen angeboten. Im vierten Quartal steht das umkämpfte Weihnachtsgeschäft an.
Guy Verhofstadt, der Chef der Liberalen im Europäischen Parlament, hat die US-Regierung dazu aufgefordert, sich für die NSA-Überwachung zu entschuldigen. Der ehemalige belgische Regierungschef sagte gegenüber der Tageszeitung „Die Welt“: „Ich appelliere an Martin Schulz als Präsidenten des Europäischen Parlaments, US-Aussenminister John Kerry zu einer der nächsten Plenarsitzungen einzuladen.
in Atlanta now hands out about 550 Apple iPads each year to students for classroom teaching and homework purposes. And while students love them, some parents are now pressing the IT department to restrict use of apps on the devices because they think there's too much game-playing. "We don't block the apps the students are using, and a lot of students are playing Angry Birds, something we don't want," says Brian Meeks, network engineer at Paideia School. Teachers there have embraced iPads as an academic tool for classroom learning, and the school's philosophy is to encourage students to adhere to using iPads only for schoolwork. But kids will be kids, and their parents are noticing their children see the iPads as great toys as well. on the student iPads for purposes that include managing inventory, configuring and installing apps, and checking to make sure iPads aren't "jailbroken." In the future, Sophos Mobile Control may be used to restrict the apps that students use, too, Meeks says. Differentiating between apps for work and play is Businesses and government have similar concerns about work and personal apps. Most of the MDM software can use whitelisting to restrict apps, points out Andrew Braunberg, research director at NSS Labs, which does analysis and testing of network gear.
About one in five people around the globe use a social networking site and that number is expected to grow significantly over the next several years. About 1.61 billion people will use a social networking site, such as Facebook, Google+, , a market research company. That's a 14.2 percent increase from 2012, and double-digit growth is expected to continue through next year. By 2017, 2.33 billion people will use social networks, the company said. The World Bank has reported that there were 7.046 billion people last year. That means this year 22.8 percent of the world's population is using social networks at least every month.
The cyber-gang running the is sharing a big cut of any payments they squeeze out of their victims with criminal botnet owners working closely with them, says Symantec, which has been monitoring this underworld activity online. The CryptoLocker gang, believed to be mainly Russian-speaking, created the malware that makes use of strong encryption to lock up the victim's electronic files until the victim pays a ransom, which typically starts at least $150 to get the key to unlock their scrambled files. The gang itself is paying criminal botnet owners operating vast command-and-control systems of compromised computers to distribute CryptoLocker as a dangerous attachment in spam, says Liam O'Murchu, manager of security response operations at Symantec. In addition to spam distribution, which relies on the victim opening the malware-laden attachment to spread CryptoLocker, the gang is willing to pay a botnet owner as much as 75 percent of any extortion money they can get from victims if the botnet owner directly drops CryptoLocker onto a compromised machine it already controls. Doing that basically scores a direct hit for CryptoLocker but can be counted as a loss of a compromised computer for botnet owners, hence the willingness to share such a high percentage of the monetary gain netted from any victim, O'Murchu says. "They're making a lot of money," and victims are expected to pay in Bitcoin or MoneyPak.
Activist group Privacy International has launched an ambitious project to track the spread of commercial surveillance, spying and tracking technology and the often secretive firms selling into the booming sector. Compiled from a variety of sources over the last four years, the includes 1203 documents covering 338 firms, 97 surveillance systems, and 36 countries, including some from the U.S. and U.K. "This research was conducted as part of our , an investigation into the international surveillance trade that focuses on the sale of technologies by Western companies to repressive regimes intent on using them as tools of political control," said Matt Rice of Privacy International in his introduction to the database. "What we found, and what we are publishing, is downright scary." The notion of "legitimate" surveillance has always been contentious, but the activities of a number of firms have recently raised the concern level a notch.
While major memory vendors have started producing next-generation DDR4 memory, don't expect to see it in servers until late next year, and it won't appear in PCs and tablets for about 18 months. Until Intel and AMD begin supporting DDR4 in their processor boards, users won't be able to enjoy of the technology, which offer twice the performance, twice the base capacity (16GB) and 20 percent to 40 percent less power consumption than today's technology, according to industry analysts. Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron are memory boards. Both Intel and AMD have confirmed to Computerworld that each expects to begin supporting DDR4 memory on processor boards next year.
The idea that the world stands on the edge of an is barely out of the hype cycle and already Verizon has announced a cloud system designed to authenticate the billions of devices that might one day populate it. Verizon's new flag in the sand is called that will be generated by smart energy meters, automobile systems, and home monitoring technology. If consumers ever do start buying the that can tell them they are running out of milk, the data will probably pass through authentication systems such as MCS. Importantly, this seductive omni-embedded world can't come into being without such technology existing first. MCS is on sale now in the U.S. and Europe, with Asia-Pacific due to be added next month.
Stuxnet's creators recognized they had built the world's first true cyber-weapon and were more interested in pushing the envelope of this new type of digital warfare than causing large-scale destruction within a study shows. In an analysis released last week, Ralph Langner, head of The Langner Group and a renowned expert in industrial control systems (ICS), also refuted arguments that only a nation-state had the resources to launch a Stuxnet-like attack. Assailants with less ambition could take the lessons learned and apply them to civilian critical infrastructure, he said. "While Stuxnet was clearly the work of a nation-state requiring vast resources and considerable intelligence future attacks on industrial control and other so-called 'cyber-physical' systems may not be," Langner said in an article he wrote about his study for Foreign Policy magazine. Langner's analysis was based on reverse engineering the attack code in Stuxnet and combining the data with the design of the targeted nuclear facility and background information on the uranium-enrichment process.
"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.