Nokia hat grünes Licht aus Brüssel für den Verkauf seiner Handysparte an den Softwareriesen Microsoft bekommen. Die obersten Kartellwächter in der EU genehmigten heute das Vorhaben ohne Auflagen, teilte die EU-Kommission mit.
Innerschweizer IT-Unternehmen wie Bison Schweiz, Green.ch und A+F Computersysteme machen sich zusammen mit weiteren Vertretern aus der Wirtschaft und der Politik für die Schaffung des Departementes Informatik an der Hochschule Luzern ein. Im Rahmen einer Medienkonferenz, die heute, Mittwoch, stattfand, haben sie einen offenen Brief an den Regierungsrat unterzeichnet.
Einen rasanten Anstieg des weltweiten Spam-Aufkommens in der Höhe von 125 Prozent hat das IT-Sicherheitsunternehmen McAfee im dritten Quartal in seinem Bedrohungsreport registriert. Zudem bleibt das Betriebssystem Android bei Cyberkriminellen beliebt, hier wurden rund 700.000 neue Malware-Exemplare ausgemacht. Konstant im Trend lag die Verwendung von digital signierter Schadsoftware.
Die Hünenberger Littlebit Technology und Nexanet wollen ihre Geschäftstätigkeiten künftig zusammenlegen. Der gemeinsame Weg soll ab 1. April 2014 beginnen. Littlebit übernimmt dabei die Aktienmehrheit beim fusionierten Unternehmen.
Samsung geht mit dem Vorwurf von Patentverletzungen gegen Anbieter von Toner-Patronen für seine Drucker vor. Der südkoreanische Elektronik-Konzern erwirkte Ende November Einstweilige Verfügungen in München gegen sieben Händler, die nachgebaute Kartuschen verkauft hätten. Zudem seien Klagen gegen weitere Reseller eingereicht worden.
Google will eigene Roboter bauen, und das Projekt wird vom Erfinder des dominierenden Smartphone-Systems Android angeführt. Andy Rubin enthüllte in einem Interview der „New York Times“, dass Google unter seiner Regie bereits sieben Spezialfirmen gekauft habe.
Vor rund einer Woche bekam Apple ein Patent zugesprochen, das dem Konzept der Lytro-Kamera ähnelt. Damit kann bei Fotos nachträglich der Fokus geändert werden. Apples Ambitionen gehen bei Kameratechnologien aber noch weiter. So soll aktuell an einer Technologie geforscht werden, die Tiefenschärfe am iPhone verbessern soll.
Das USB Implementors Forum hat den neuen Typ C angekündigt, bei dem der Stecker auch "verkehrt" eingesteckt werden kann. Dafür wird in Zukunft aber ein Adapter notwendig sein, den USB-C ist den mit bisherigen Steckern nicht mehr kompatibel. Stecker für Anschlusskabel neuerer iPhones und iPads können am Gerät in beiden Ausrichtungen angeschlossen werden. Ein Oben und Unten gibt es beim "Lightning Port" nicht.
Die Begleichung von Rechnungen via Mausklick wird in der Schweiz zunehmend beliebter. Nach einer Erhebung der Finanzinfrastrukturgruppe SIX und der Postfinance nutzen mittlerweile eine Million SchweizerInnen die Möglichkeiten der E-Rechnung.
Eine Autofahrerin muss sich in den USA wegen des Tragens einer Google-Brille am Steuer verantworten. Die 44-jährige Cecilia Abadie plädierte allerdings vor Gericht auf nicht schuldig, da die Brille während der Fahrt nicht eingeschaltet gewesen sei.
The U.S. Federal Communications Commission has given its blessing to Verizon Communication’s proposed $130 billion purchase of the stake that Vodafone Group has in Verizon Wireless. The FCC Wednesday approved a Verizon petition to allow the company to be more than 25 percent owned by foreign investors, with the Vodafone deal distributing Verizon shares to stockholders in the U.K. company. The FCC also approved the transfer of control of Vodafone’s share to Verizon. Verizon now controls 55 percent of Verizon Wireless and the deal would transfer the remaining 45 percent controlled by Vodafone to the parent company. Verizon announced plans to purchase the Vodafone stake last September and the company expects the deal to close in the first quarter of 2014. Verizon’s application was first use of a streamlined foreign-ownership rules procedures that the FCC adopted earlier this year.
Once heavily reliant on the Chinese market, Lenovo is now looking to make acquisitions as it tries to expand its growing enterprise business to other countries. Lenovo, widely known as a PC company, started selling bare-bones servers in 2008. The company established its Enterprise Product Group a year ago and now wants to build server, software, networking, storage and software portfolios through acquisitions and partnerships, said Roy Guillen, vice president and general of the Enterprise Product Group at Lenovo. ”If you look at the way our PC business grew, we were not shy of making acquisitions. We added companies that brought scale, they bought presence, they brought intellectual property,” Guillen said. “We’ve been looking at the same thing in enterprise and we’ll continue to do so.” Lenovo acquired IBM’s PC division in 2005 and that the Chinese company was negotiating to acquire IBM’s x86 server operations. Guillen declined to comment on whether negotiations took place.
Cyber Monday may have ended, but e-tailers are keen on keeping the deals flowing. Topping our list today is a cool new model from HP that actually senses your hand motions to interact with the PC, along with being packed full of the latest technology from Intel. Dell is also taking a rare discount off their popular UltraSharp monitors, yielding near all-time low prices on the pro-grade displays. You'll also want to check out an exclusive deal through SOS Online Backup, giving you some hefty savings on keeping your critical data safely backed up to the cloud. Scroll down to get these and the rest of today's top deals. 4th-gen Core i7 Quad Edition Laptop w/1080p screen, Blu-ray, 2TB Hard Drive & 4GB GeForce GT 750M graphics for ). 100GB-250GB Cloud Storage and starting only $7.49 per month (normally $9.99).
Google says its top Shopping results are clearly labeled as sponsored by merchants.
The European Commission has cleared Microsoft’s acquisition of the devices and services division of Finland’s Nokia, it said Wednesday. The decision follows approval of the $7 billion deal by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission over the weekend. With the two regulatory approvals, the deal is now clear to be completed. The European Commission said it was granting approval for the deal because a combination of Nokia’s handset and smartphone business with Microsoft wouldn’t substantially harm competition. ”There are only modest overlaps between the parties’ activities and the links between Microsoft’s mobile operating systems, mobile applications and enterprise mail server software with Nokia’s smart mobile devices are unlikely to lead to competitors being shut out from the market,” the commission said in a statement.
The Bluetooth Special Interest Group said Wednesday that it had published Bluetooth 4.1, which prepares Bluetooth peripherals for the “Internet of Things” by allowing them to serve as both hub and peripheral devices, and paving the way for them to directly connect to the Internet. Put another way, Bluetooth 4.1 devices like fitness trackers will be able to collate data from sensors like heart monitors and temperature gauges, then report back to a smartphone with their findings. In turn, those phones could be used as sensors that other devices can communicate with and pull data from. The update is the first major release since late 2010, when the SIG announced Bluetooth 4.0 or , an update that reduced the power consumed by Bluetooth devices. A spokeswoman for the SIG said that she expects to see several chip companies announce Bluetooth 4.1-compatible products as soon as qualifications are enabled on December 10. And there’s some more good news: “The updates are all software related, so an over the air update can upgrade [Bluetooth] radios that are currently in market,” the spokeswoman added.
found that almost 40 percent of all browsers have critical vulnerabilities that could enable cyber criminals access to your personal data. scans and discovered some alarming trends. Kandek found that 41 percent of Internet Explorer browsers, 35 percent of Firefox, and 40 percent of Chrome have at least one critical vulnerability. In a blog post describing the research, Kandek also pointed out that the browser itself is only part of the problem: “The larger part of the problems are contributed by the plug-ins that we use to extend the capabilities of our browsers, led by Adobe Shockwave and followed by Oracle Java and Apple Quicktime.” this year—a 15 percent increase over last year.
Anyone who goes to the movies knows what happens to those who steal from organized crime. It isn't pretty. (Okay, sometimes they live happily ever after, but that's only because it's a movie.) But now that familiar script could be happening for real in the dark recesses of the Internet. And the ending is yet to be written. A major underground bazaar, Sheep Marketplace, suddenly closed down Saturday, claiming that hackers stole 5,400 Bitcoins (BTC). At the current (extremely volatile) rate of exchange, that's about six million dollars. After the in October, Sheep Marketplace became the largest seller of illegal drugs and other illicit product on the Internet. Not surprisingly, it did its business in Bitcoins, a peer-to-peer currency not backed by any government. Like cash, Bitcoins leave no record of where they have been or who they belong to. And like cash, that makes them attractive for illegal business. That six million dollars may be the tip of the iceberg. Various reports claim that more than $40 million, or even as much as $100 million, has been stolen.
A congressional hearing Wednesday on the botched rollout of HealthCare.gov was largely a forum for Republican critics of U.S. government involvement in the health-care industry and other large social programs. The website malfunctions were a glaring example of how the U.S. government often fails to deliver on huge projects, some lawmakers and representatives of conservative groups said during a hearing of the U.S. House of Representatives Oversight and Government Reform Committee. The committee, controlled by politicians largely hostile to U.S. President Barack Obama’s agenda, billed the hearing as a forum for criticism of HealthCare.gov and the limitations of big government. The hearing, though, often veered away from the website into broader criticisms of the underlying Affordable Care Act, the health insurance reform bill passed in 2010, and of government social programs in general. The HealthCare.gov rollout has “undeniably been, inarguably, a disaster,” said Representative Darrell Issa, a California Republican and committee chairman. “It is not a disaster of the making of one man or any one person. In fact, in many ways, it is a sign of a failed system that is often seen in the federal government.”
Recognizing the growing popularity of Node.js for building distributed Web applications, cloud provider Joyent will soon offer a commercial support package for managing the platform, wherever it is run. is aimed at heavy commercial users of Node.js. The service will inspect Node.js systems and provide data to troubleshoot issues. . The service can also work with any private deployments of Node.js that are running on either Linux or Solaris servers.
Ruby on Rails users are advised to upgrade to newly released versions of the Web development framework that contain important security fixes, according to the Rails development team. The 3.2.16 Rails version addresses two cross-site scripting vulnerabilities and a denial-of-service issue and strengthens a previous patch for an unsafe query generation flaw. The two cross-site scripting vulnerabilities, identified as , are located in the internationalization component and the number_to_currency helper, respectively. Both vulnerabilities allow an attacker to execute a cross-site scripting attack by sending specially crafted input to vulnerable applications. The denial-of-service vulnerability, tracked as , is located in the header handling component of Action View and allows an attacker to force an application to cache strings sent in specially crafted headers. This can cause the cache to grow indefinitely and consume all available memory on the server.
Imagine future: your smartphone chimes, you walk to the door, and touch your Android phone to a small tracked robot that hands you a package. Off it trundles back to a Google self-driving car, and on to the next delivery. Sound far-fetched? Well, another piece of the puzzle dropped into place on Wednesday, when Google’s Andy Rubin revealed that he was heading up Google’s nascent robotics department. Rubin actually revelaed little, other than that the company has picked up several robotics houses. The idea, however, is that the robotics project is less a “moonshot” than an attempt to achieve something like low earth orbit—a project designed to become a product sooner, rather than later. As the , which is already shipping to early adopters and will become a formal product sometime in 2014. ”I am excited about Andy Rubin’s next project,” Larry Page, Google’s chief executive, said on his . “His last big bet, Android, started off as a crazy idea that ended up putting a supercomputer in hundreds of millions of pockets. It is still very early days for this, but I can’t wait to see the progress.”
We have a release date but no other details about the addictive political drama’s second season.
In a move that could add momentum to game development on Linux, game maker Valve has joined the Linux Foundation and will contribute tools for developers to work with its SteamOS. Valve is a game development and digital distribution company known for games like the first person shooter “Half Life”, online action game “Counter Strike” and the Portal puzzle games. The Bellevue, Washington, company is also behind the PC gaming platform Steam. Available for Windows, Mac and Linux it offers access to more than 1,800 game titles and connects 35 million active users each month. The platform is also used by independent developers to distribute their games. Valve has been expanding its efforts on Linux for the past year. In February it released , a Linux-based OS that can be used to power game consoles. Joining the Linux Foundation is one of the many ways Valve is investing in the advancement of Linux gaming, the company said in a joint news release.
This week, Microsoft researchers disclosed that they had developed a prototype bra to sense when women were overstressed, and thus susceptible to binge eating. . "We tried to do the same thing for men's underwear but it was too far away (from the heart)." By notifying an overstressed woman, the research goes, the lady in question could be advised to slow down, relax, and not reach for the chocolate. . Now, it's time to go inside the virtual vault of Microsoft's R&D facility and wonder what else it could be working on:
Amazon’s ambitious plan to use flying drones to deliver packages is far-fetched, but not just because of technology limitations or air traffic regulations. Amazon’s fulfillment center network, as it stands now, is too limited to serve even a tiny fraction of the U.S. in the method described by CEO Jeff Bezos. Many of Amazon’s fulfillment centers are based in rural towns where land for the sprawling warehouses is inexpensive. As during his interview with CBS television news program “60 Minutes” the unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) would be able to deliver packages within a 10-mile radius of the fulfillment centers. That means if you’re one of the 10,000 people who live in Coffeyville, Kansas or Campbellsville, Kentucky then you’re in luck. But residents of New York, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., Chicago, Denver, San Francisco and other big cities can forget about Prime Air service unless Amazon expands its distribution footprint. This map shows 60 distribution centers across 15 states. The blue circles around the fulfillment centers represent the 10-mile range of the drones. The default view shows how little of the country would be covered by the proposed service. Technical and regulatory issues aside, this is a serious limitation.
Two million logins and passwords from services such as Facebook, Google and Twitter have been found on a Netherlands-based server, part of a large botnet using controller software nicknamed “Pony.” Daniel Chechik, a security researcher with Trustwave’s SpiderLabs. It’s expected that cybercriminals will go after main online services, but “payroll services accounts could actually have direct financial repercussions,” he wrote. ADP moved $1.4 trillion in fiscal 2013 within the U.S., paying one in six workers in the country, according to its website.
Apple’s iPhone could be getting a step closer to being officially offered on China’s largest mobile network, after the nation’s government finally issued 4G licenses to operate LTE TDD networks in the country. Authorities issued the licenses on Wednesday to all three of the nation’s mobile operators, including the largest, China Mobile, which has over 750 million customers. The carrier has been deploying base stations across the country using the 4G technology known as LTE TDD (Long-Term Evolution Time Division Duplex). Already, China Mobile has been marketing its upcoming 4G services, and local regulators have cleared select phones capable of supporting the LTE standard, also known as TD-LTE in China. Among the handsets approved by regulators earlier this year are special models of the iPhone 5s and 5c designed for use on TD-LTE networks. Most other countries use LTE-FDD (Frequency Division Multiplexing) for their 4G networks.
The next version of the USB connector will accept the plug either way up, the USB 3.0 Promoter Group said Tuesday. The USB Type-C connector, initially intended for USB 3.1 and 2.0 devices, will be a complete redesign, the group said. It will be similar in size to the USB 2.0 Micro-B plug found on most modern cellphones, and will support scalable power charging. In comparison, the USB 3.0 Micro-B plug is wider than that for USB 2.0 devices. The new connector will also be tailored to work well with emerging product designs and will scale for future USB bus performance, said the group, whose members include Hewlett-Packard, Intel, Microsoft, Renesas Electronics and Texas Instruments. Following a lead set by Apple with the Lightning connector used in the iPhone 5 and newer iPads and iPods, the USB Type-C plug and socket will fit either way up, avoiding fumbling to find the correct orientation, the group said.
a year and a half ago, adding some new features that (mostly) impressed me. It’s suffering from a few growing pains, but it remains one of the few email services that lives up to its promise of saving you time by bringing order to your inbox. The cloud-based Sanebox works with any IMAP-based email service. You simply enter your email address on their site and give the service permission to access your account. It then goes to work analyzing the contents of your inbox. You can connect social networks such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter in order to give Sanebox more information on which to base its decisions. Those decisions are about which emails you need to see now versus those that can wait until you're ready to deal with them. And Sanebox does a remarkably good job of determining that: It whittled my Gmail inbox down to 86 unread messages. Impressive, especially when you consider that it started with nearly 1,000 unread items. Sanebox doesn’t delete emails, but simply organizes them into folders it creates, called “SaneArchive,” “SaneCC” (currently in beta), “SaneLater,” and “SaneNews.” Once the service is activated, messages that belong in those folders are delivered right into those folders, rather than cluttering up your inbox. And Sanebox alerts you with a daily digest message so you can see which messages you may have missed and allows you to train the service, so that it will deliver future messages into the right place. You also can check these folders at any time to make sure you’re not missing anything important.
It's true: One car offers interior scent control, and you’ll also see dual displays, digital instrument clusters, and better connectivity (for a fee).
AMD lovers, we hear ya. After building a for $1000, we’re starting with a cheaper, more powerful AMD CPU this time around. And we won’t just walk you through the different steps in building a PC with AMD hardware—we’ll also determine whether an Intel processor or an AMD processor can give you a more powerful PC for the same budget. Let’s dive in! Building a system around an AMD processor means making a couple of concessions. Although their performance is still very good, none of AMD’s current processors offer nearly the same IPC (instructions per clock) performance as Intel’s processors do. Clock for clock, or core for core, Intel’s processors simply offer better performance—at this time. Intel’s processors are also more power-efficient, though I doubt that most desktop users care much about a few watts here and there. On the flip side, choosing an AMD processor (and an accompanying AMD-compatible motherboard) will typically be less expensive. If you don’t intend to purchase a discrete graphics card and you hope to rely on integrated graphics, AMD’s current APUs (accelerated processing units) offer greater game compatibility, better driver support, and superior overall GPU performance versus Intel’s on-processor HD graphics products. To sum up: In general, AMD CPUs are less powerful and require slightly more juice than competing Intel CPUs do, but they offer better built-in graphics performance and usually come at a lower price.
File-hosting website Hotfile has agreed to pay $80 million in damages and was also ordered to stop operations unless it uses copyright filtering technologies that prevent infringement of the works of studios, the Motion Picture Association of America said Tuesday. The entry of the judgment against Hotfile marks the end of the studios’ litigation against the cyberlocker and its principal, Anton Titov, the movie industry body said. The jury trial of the case was scheduled for Monday. Five U.S. movie studios filed a copyright infringement suit against Hotfile in 2011, alleging that the company paid incentives to users for uploading popular files to the system, that were widely shared. The scheme hence provided incentives to users to upload popular copyright infringing content to attract users who would pay for premium accounts to access and download the files, according to the complaint by the studios. The US District Court for the Southern District of Florida found in August that Hotfile was liable for copyright infringement, and Titov was personally liable for Hotfile’s infringement.
While China’s demand for electronics continues to soar, the tech services market may be shrinking for U.S. enterprise vendors. Security concerns over U.S. secret surveillance are giving the Chinese government and local companies more reason to trust domestic vendors, according to industry experts. The country has always tried to support its homegrown tech industry, but lately it is increasingly favoring local brands over foreign competition. Starting this year, the nation’s government tenders have required IT suppliers to source more products from local Chinese firms, said an executive at a U.S.-based storage supplier that sells to China. In some cases, the tenders have required 50 percent or more of the equipment to come from domestic brands, said the executive, who requested anonymity. Recent leaks by former U.S. National Security Agency contractor, Edward Snowden, about the U.S.’s secret spying program aren’t helping the matter. “I think in general China wants to favor local brands; they feel their technology is getting better,” the executive said. “Snowden has just caused this to accelerate incrementally.”
Yahoo has acquired Ptch, the startup behind a mobile app that allowed users to combine photos and video on their phones into movies, and the service will shut down by January. Incubated by DreamWorks Animation, Ptch was positioned as a social media application that enabled users to make stylized short videos, called ptches, and share them with the Ptch network of users as well as on Facebook and Twitter timelines. ”We acquired the company, which includes the people and the technology they built,” a Yahoo spokeswoman said via email Tuesday. She did not disclose the terms of the deal. .
list of the antimalware programs that do the best job of removing malware from an already infected system. What does this mean? As A-V Comparative notes, most PC users don’t consider antivirus protection until their computer has already been infected, so its intent was not to review detection rates but rather how well these software packages clean malware they’ve already identified. “Good malware detection is very important to find existing malware that is already on a system,” the report states. “However, a high protection or detection rate of a product does not necessariy mean that a product has good removal abilities. On the other hand, a product with a low detction rate may not even find the infection and be able to remove it.”With that said, several popular packages earned the top, three-star rating: Kaspersky Lab, Bitdefender, Avira, FortiNet, ESET, Avast, and Panda—listed in order of their performance. Kaspersky was ranked the highest of all of the packages tested. Note that simply removing malware isn’t a binary process; as the report notes, “removing” the malware may leave the system with anything from a compromised HOSTS file to a disabled task manager. The report also provides a handy list of “recovery disk” links in case your system gets seriously trashed. Some malware will block access to vendor websites, requiring the need for offline access. A-V Comparative made several recommendations to vendors to solve these security problems—which, to their credit, those vendors had implemented, A-V Comparative said.
Faster SANs are on the horizon as the next Fibre Channel specification, calling for 32G bps (bits per second), nears publication. Fibre Channel is the traditional interface for storage area networks and is still widely used amid newer alternatives such as iSCSI and FCoE (Fibre Channel over ethernet). Since its beginnings nearly 20 years ago, Fibre Channel has steadily advanced to the 8G bps gear widely used today and 16G bps technology, which enterprises are just starting to adopt. Now the physical interface specification for a future version that can reach 32G bps has been finished and sent to the American National Standards Institute (ANSI), the Fibre Channel Industry Association (FCIA) said on Tuesday. ANSI, which oversees a wide range of technical standards, is set to publish the specification in the first quarter of next year, the industry group said. The specification was developed by a standards committee under ANSI, which calls it the sixth generation of Fibre Channel. Publication by ANSI will be the final step for the standard, but vendors have months of work ahead of them to develop silicon, switches and adapters with the new speed. The FCIA expects 32G bps products to go on sale in 2015 or 2016. Brocade, a major vendor of Fibre Channel switches, expects its first 32G bps products to be generally available in early 2016.
Windows tablets will gain market share in the coming years, but not fast enough to challenge the dominance of Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS, IDC said on Tuesday. IDC is projecting Windows tablets to occupy 10.2 percent of the market by 2017, growing from a projected market share of 3 percent this year. By comparison, tablets based on Android and iOS will register slight dips in market share. In 2017 Android will have a tablet market share of 58.8 percent, compared to the projected market share of 60.8 this year. Apple’s iOS will have a tablet market share of 30.6 percent in 2017, compared to 35 percent this year. Over time, Microsoft’s market share in the tablet market will increase, thanks to more devices and aggressive pricing. But underlying Windows OS, device design and application problems will continue to prevent faster growth, said Tom Mainelli, research director of tablet research at IDC.