IT News Head Lines (ComputerWorld) 8/25/2014

How to understand Twitter's bad new direction
Twitter this week made two small changes that indicate a big shift in direction for everybody's favorite microblogging service

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Amazon building ad system to compete with Google's
Amazon plans to expand its small online ad delivery business enough to take on Google's AdWords, according to The Wall Street Journal.

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US warns 'significant number' of major businesses hit by Backoff malware
More than 1,000 major enterprise networks and small and medium businesses in the U.S. have been compromised by a recently discovered malware package called "Backoff" and are probably unaware of it, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said in a cybersecurity alert on Friday.

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Google acquires Gecko Design for next-gen products
Google has acquired Gecko Design, which will become part of the Internet company's unit developing cutting-edge products like Glass and balloons for Internet access.

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Oregon sues Oracle over troubled health insurance website
Oregon has filed a long-expected lawsuit against Oracle over its role developing the state's troubled health insurance exchange website.

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Trade-in volume signals 'tremendous' sales for iPhone 6
Early sales of Apple's iPhone 6 will likely be 'tremendous,' buyback vendors said today, basing their predictions on recent activity by consumers locking in prices for their old smartphones.

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SAP takes steps to simplify pricing and licensing
It took some time and considerable internal effort, but SAP says it has made good on a pledge to simplify its software pricing and licensing model.

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Cyborg moths could act like living drones in search and rescue
By electronically manipulating the flight muscles of moths, scientists are one step closer to creating biobots that could fly over a disaster area and spot survivors or hazards.

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Inexpensive Windows PCs hit the market with help from Microsoft
Microsoft is helping hardware makers build low-priced Windows PCs to combat Chromebooks, and the early results of that effort are hitting the market.

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Study disputes predictions of coming spectrum crunch
Widely accepted projections of a shortage of mobile spectrum may not be as dire as many analysts in the mobile and tech sectors are making it out to be, according to a new study.

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Available Tags:Amazon , Google , Oracle , iPhone 6 , iPhone , SAP , Windows , Microsoft , 

IT News Head Lines (ComputerWorld) 8/19/2014

Microsoft urges customers to uninstall 'Blue Screen of Death' update
Microsoft is quietly recommending that customers uninstall one of last week's security updates after users reported that it crippled their computers with the infamous "Blue Screen of Death."

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Startup builds intrusion prevention system for home networks
At a time of growing concern about the security of interconnected devices in homes, a startup aims to provide consumers with a type of network security system traditionally used by businesses.

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Available Tags:Microsoft , 

IT News Head Lines (ComputerWorld) 8/16/2014

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols: Patent trolls under attack, but not dead yet
The patent wars keep going and going and we keep paying and paying.

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Microsoft: Give IE another chance
In a wide-ranging "Ask Me Anything" chat on Reddit, developers and program managers from the Microsoft Internet Explorer team urged users to give the browser another chance.

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Rimini Street downplays impact of adverse ruling in Oracle lawsuit
Rimini Street has put on a brave face following a federal judge's determination that it stole Oracle's intellectual property in the course of providing software support to its customers.

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Grocery stores in multiple states hit by data breach
A data breach at Supervalu Inc., one of the largest grocery wholesalers and retailers in the U.S., could affect thousands of people who shopped at the company's stores in June and July.

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What failure looks like in Microsoft's cloud-first world
Continuous delivery, company-wide hackathons, growth hacking, features driven by user feedback through sites like user voice: The new face of Microsoft is all about moving faster and being more responsive. Moving faster can also mean things breaking. But failure, and what you do when things go wrong, look rather different in a cloud-first mobile-first world.

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Sprint plans price cuts and eventual layoffs, new CEO tells workers
Sprint's new CEO Marcelo Claure addressed employees for the first time Thursday and promised price reductions as soon as next week, according to a report.

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Heartbleed software flaw exposes weaknesses in hardware design
Heartbleed may have been a software bug, but it highlighted glaring weaknesses in existing hardware architectures, which remain vulnerable to memory-bound attacks, a university researcher said this week.

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Liberty Reserve official pleads guilty to money laundering
An official with Liberty Reserve, a popular digital currency service that was based in Costa Rica, has pleaded guilty to money laundering and operating an unlicensed money transmitting business.

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6 Things to Know About Choosing a New IT Vendor
We tend to approach new vendors based on the products they sell and choose vendors largely based on what we believe the products do. Unfortunately, this leads us to buy solutions that we often never fully deploy or that often fail to meet our expectations. What's more, we rarely conduct a causal analysis of the problems.

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Available Tags:IE , Oracle , CEO , hardware , 

IT News Head Lines (ComputerWorld) 8/14/2014

Oracle's Sparc M7 chip to supercharge in-memory computing
Oracle has given the first peek at its upcoming Sparc M7 processor, promising big performance gains for customers who use the in-memory compute features of its 12C database.

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Rivalry between Uber and Lyft gets ugly
Two of the hottest startups for requesting rides from your smartphone are accusing each other of dirty tricks.

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Google packs Classroom off to school
Just in time for the new school year, Google has launched a tool called Classroom that aims to make teachers' harried lives a little easier.

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Microsoft to speed up Bing with FPGAs next year
It started off as an experiment, but Microsoft now wants to speed up and return more accurate Bing search results with the help of reconfigurable chips called FPGAs (field-programmable gate arrays) in data centers.

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Google tightens Gmail spam filtering
Google is boosting Gmail's ability to detect and block malicious emails from spammers and scammers that exploit similarities among Unicode characters to dupe users into clicking on bad links.

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Microsoft's Patch Tuesday updates focus on Internet Explorer
Microsoft has issued 29 patches for its Internet Explorer browser, including one fixing a critical vulnerability that would allow a remote attacker to gain access to a computer from over the Internet.

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Mac sales so far in '14 may signal share push
The Mac is poised to break Apple's annual sales record this year, according to an analysis of past sales trends as well as Wall Street projections.

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Accused Obamacare spammer settles FTC charges, will pay $350K
A company accused of sending unsolicited and deceptive email before the roll out of the U.S. Affordable Care Act will pay US$350,000 to settle a complaint from the U.S. Federal Trade Commission.

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White House's new IT engineer is sharp, witty, and blunt
If the White House learned one thing from the Healthcare.gov debacle, it was that the government needs clear-thinking people who can see a problem for what it is. Mikey Dickerson may just be that person.

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Available Tags:Google , Microsoft , Bing , Gmail , Mac , 

IT News Head Lines (ComputerWorld) 8/13/2014

AMD mulls custom ARM 64-bit server chips
Advanced Micro Devices may be willing to make custom ARM server chips for customers, much like it made custom chips for the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 game consoles.

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Study finds firmware plagued by poor encryption and backdoors
The first large-scale analysis of a fundamental type of software known as firmware has revealed poor security practices that could present opportunities for hackers probing the "Internet of Things."

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Nvidia claims 64-bit Denver chip will outperform Apple's A7
Apple pioneered the use of 64-bit processors in smartphones, but Nvidia claims its 64-bit Denver chip will be even faster when it appears in devices later this year.

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School system CIOs are sold on Chromebooks
The popularity of Chromebooks in school districts may be the main reason they're seeing strong year-to-year growth.

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Dropbox gives its Android app search feature a massive facelift
Dropbox has improved the search engine of its Android application, as well as given it a document preview feature.

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The making of a cybercrime market
I recently had the opportunity to speak with two representatives from the Netherlands-based security research firm Fox-IT--Maurits Lucas, InTELL Business Director, and Andy Chandler, VP of WW Sales & Marketing. Collectively, the two shared an in-depth story of cybergang warfare suitable for Hollywood.

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Senator wants curbs placed on fitness data use
Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) wants the U.S. Federal Trade Commission to investigate the data gathering and sharing practices of makers of personal fitness devices and applications.

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State-of-the-art spear phishing and defenses
The number of phishing sites was up 10.7-percent as of Q1 this year (over last year) while at the same time almost 32.7-percent of PCs globally were infected with malware, including adware and spyware, indicating that phishing is an increasing issue for the enterprise, according to a report from the Anti-Phishing Working Group of the Internet Engineering Task Force.

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Rebuilt Mobile Apps Help SeaWorld Make a Splash
After three years of poring over how customers used its first mobile app, SeaWorld Parks and Entertainment recently rolled out a new set of apps designed to engage park visitors with a more personalized, interactive experience.

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Google backs $300M undersea fiber optic cable to Japan
Google is joining forces with five Asian telecommunications firms to build and operate an underwater cable system from the U.S. to Japan to support rising bandwidth usage and better link its data centers in other parts of the world.

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Available Tags:AMD , server , Nvidia , Android , Google , 

IT News Head Lines (ComputerWorld) 8/12/2014

Update: Payment cards with chips aren't perfect, so encrypt everything, experts say
There's a push to adopt chip-equipped payment cards in the U.S. following high-profile breaches at large retailers and restaurant chains during the past 12 months, but experts warn that switching to this payment system will not make fraud disappear.

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Home routers supplied by ISPs can be compromised en masse
Specialized servers used by many ISPs to manage routers and other gateway devices provisioned to their customers are accessible from the Internet and can easily be taken over by attackers, researchers warn.

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At Defcon, hacker coalition calls for safer computer systems in vehicles
A collective of security researchers issued a letter Friday from the DefCon hacker conference in Las Vegas urging the automotive industry to adopt five principles for building safer computer systems in vehicles.

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IT News Head Lines (ComputerWorld) 8/11/2014

Getting past the most basic physical security of all: Learning to pick locks at DEFCON 22
Much like my experience with learning to hack at RSA, learning to pick locks was something that I was very interested in learning how to do, but approached with much trepidation given that I had zero experience with the practice. Nevertheless I thought I'd give it a shot, so I headed down to the Lockpicking Village at this year's DEFCON 22 so I could be shown the ropes.

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Google, Facebook go beyond social, beyond identity
In order to understand the strange but spectacularly profitable world of Google and Facebook today, it's important to start in the fall of 2010.

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Payment cards with chips aren't perfect, so encrypt everything, experts say
There's a push to adopt chip-equipped payment cards in the U.S. following high-profile breaches at large retailers and restaurant chains during the past 12 months, but experts warn that switching to this payment system will not make fraud disappear.

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Steve Jobs was 'central figure' in Silicon Valley hiring case, judge says
In rejecting a proposed settlement in Silicon Valley's closely watched "no hire" case, District Judge Lucy Koh said on Friday there's strong evidence that Steve Jobs was a central figure, if not "the" central figure, in the alleged conspiracy to suppress workers' wages.

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Seven ways DARPA is trying to kill the password
A seemingly constant stream of data breaches and this week's news that Russian hackers have amassed a database of 1.2 billion Internet credentials has many people asking: Isn't it time we dumped the user name and password?

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Judge says settlement is too low in Silicon Valley hiring case
A California judge has rejected the proposed settlement in a lawsuit over no-hire agreements among top Silicon Valley companies, saying the amount being offered to compensate workers is too low.

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New WorldView 3 satellite to offer unprecedented look at the globe
DigitalGlobe's WorldView 3 satellite, scheduled to launch next week, promises to bring unprecedented resolution to commercial satellite imagery.

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FCC mandates emergency texting services from carriers, texting apps
The U.S. Federal Communications Commission voted Friday to require U.S. mobile carriers and many text-messaging apps to enable users to text emergency dispatch centers, even after questions about whether the centers will be ready by the deadline.

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Peer pressure! Business pushing the cloud on enterprise IT
When you graduated from high school, you might have thought peer pressure was mostly over.

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Available Tags:security , Facebook ,