Big losers in the hacking game
IF YOU were looking for the digital equivalent of an oil spill, hackers lifting personal details of up to 100 million people would probably qualify. And so Sir Howard Stringer, the Welshman who is the first non-Japanese to lead Sony in its 65-year history, finds himself in much the same position as Tony Hayward did when the Deepwater Horizon explosion occurred.
At least nobody has been killed in this event; but the news that the PlayStation Network with 77 million users and the Sony Online Entertainment Network with 25 million users have been hacked leaves Sir Howard struggling to apologise and clean up the mess. Read more...
EMC unveils Hadoop appliance, BI software
Among a flurry of announcements today at its annual user conference, EMC announced it will be distributing it's a free version of Apachee Hadoop and a licensed version for enterprises as well as a pre-configured appliance for big data analytics tasks.
LAS VEGAS - EMC Monday unveiled a purpose-built appliance for processing both structured and unstructured data sets for business analytics tasks. EMC today also announced the availability of two new business intelligence software products -- the Hadoop-based EMC Greenplum HD Community and Enterprise Editions -- at its EMC World user conference here. Service contracts for both software products includes installation, training and global technical support. The Greenplum HD Community Edition is a fully-certified downloadable free software stack. Read more...
Cisco, Xerox creating mobile printing system
Cisco Systems has teamed up with Xerox to create a mobile printing system that lets users print from any device to any printer.
The companies plan to make printing faster and easier for employees on the move, adding software to routers and switches to make the process faster and more secure. Cisco channel partners will resell the technology and a managed service that will be delivered by Xerox from a data center built with Cisco's UCS (Unified Computing System) servers, the companies are announcing on Monday. Read more...
HP pay-as-you-go service provides 3G mobile broadband for laptops
Hewlett-Packard said on Monday it will start offering pay-as-you-go 3G mobile broadband services for its business laptops as the company looks to package more services with PCs.
HP is offering the DataPass mobile broadband service with its new 3G-enabled Elitebook business laptops, which were also announced on Monday. The service provides access to 3G data networks in the U.S., and does not require a user to sign a monthly or yearly contract with a wireless carrier.
The DataPass service can be purchased easily in blocks through the laptop, and users don't need to pay any activation fee, said Mike Hockey, an HP spokesman. With plans starting at $5, the service is good for quick access to the Internet for different durations at places like airports or hotels, where Internet access could otherwise be expensive. Read more...
Playstation network is still not working
The PS3 network is still down after Sony feared bringing it online again after hackers exposed some of the Sony data on the world wide wibble.
However, over the weekend hackers cracked into another Sony server and posted user data online. The data is ten years old and nothing to do with the PS3 network, however it looks really bad for Sony's clean-up operation.
Itseems that Sony is saying that the PlayStation Network is likely to remain switched off for several more days. Read more...
World’s servers process 9.57ZB of data a year
Three years ago, the world's 27 million business servers processed 9.57 zettabytes, or 9,570,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes of information.
Researchers at the School of International Relations and Pacific Studies and the San Diego Supercomputer Center at the University of California, San Diego, estimate that the total is equivalent to a 5.6-billion-mile-high stack of books stretching from Earth to Neptune and back to Earth, repeated about 20 times.
By 2024, business servers worldwide will annually process the digital equivalent of a stack of books extending more than 4.37 light-years to Alpha Centauri, according to a report compiled by the scientists. Read more...
Kaspersky warns on Bin Laden videos, news
Kaspersky Lab, a leading developer of secure content and threat management solutions, has alerted Facebook and Google search engine users from Bin Laden’s death video and news spam they may be infected with.
Spammers were quite fast to reach both Windows and Mac users, and started to poison searches results in Google Images, a statement said.
Some of the search results are now leading users to malicious pages, so when clicking an image in the results page, the user will be redirected to one of the malicious domains such as -antivirus.cz.cc/fast-scan/ or pe-antivirus.cz.cc/fast-scan/, it added. Read more...
Oracle Primavera P6 Tutorial
The Oracle Primavera P6 Project Management module is comprehensive, scalable, multi- project planning and control software, built on Oracle or Microsoft SQL databases for organization-wide project management. Primavera P6 Enterprise Project Portfolio Management is an integrated project portfolio management (PPM) solution comprising role-specific functionality to satisfy each team member’s needs, responsibilities and skills. The Primavera P6 suite uses a standard windows interface, client/server architecture, web-enabled technology, and a stand-alone or network-based database. It provides a single solution for managing projects of any size, adapts to various levels of complexities within a project, and intelligently scales to meet the needs of various roles. Read more...
16 must-see downloads you may have missed this week
Sadly we can't feature every new and updated application, but that doesn't mean that some of the apps we haven't covered aren't worth rounding up. There are a number of interesting applications that are worth some investigation and we've rounded up some of them put live during the last week.
doPDF 7.2.363 is a powerful free tool you can use to produce a PDF from just about any Windows application. Instead of sending it to your printer, simply print to the doPDF device. Creating a PDF is the ideal way of distributing a document for download, by email or for commercial printing. Just about any printer will take a PDF as your master. Read more...
Facebook sharing sending readers to big news sites
Facebook is influencing what news gets read online as people use the Internet's most popular hangout to share and recommend content.
That's one of the key findings from a study on the flow of traffic to the Web's 25 largest news destinations. The study was released Monday by the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism.
Facebook was responsible for 3 percent of traffic to the 21 news sites that allowed data to be tracked, according to the study's co-author, Amy Mitchell. Five of the sites studied got 6 percent to 8 percent of their readers from Facebook.
The referrals typically came from links posted by friends on Facebook's social-networking site or from the ubiquitous "like" buttons, which Facebook encourages other websites to place alongside their content. Read more...
Five Things Google Needs to Fix in Android 3.0 Honeycomb
Make no mistake: Google's tablet-optimized Android 3.0 represents a huge improvement overall over previous versions of Google's mobile operating system. But that's not to say it gets everything right. After extensive use across multiple tablets, I've identified five things that Google needs to address in Honeycomb.
1. Improve Image Rendering
Photos viewed in Android 3.0's Gallery app appear fuzzy and washed out when compared to when you view them on other devices As I photographer, I noticed this problem immediately upon loading my own pictures on the Motorola Xoom. Ultimately, the problem comes down to Honeycomb's apparent inability to correctly render images in the image Gallery-and elsewhere. After weeks of back and forth, a Google spokesperson acknowledged the problem, but couldn't give a timeline on a fix. Thus far, there hasn't been one. Read more...
10 Major Apple iTunes Annoyances
The bane of any iDevice user's existence is Apple's barely usable iTunes software.
Not only is iTunes slow, bloated, and generally clunky--especially on Windows PCs--but it requires constant updates and maintenance, and it regularly freezes and crashes.
Let's take a look at ten reasons why iTunes is annoying.
Constant Updates
I'm sick of opening iTunes and getting the prompt, "A new version of iTunes (8.2.1.0.4.1.5) is available. Would you like to download it now?" Normally, frequent updates are a good thing (in one sense, anyway): They show that the software maker is tweaking the software to make it the best that it can be. But each iTunes "update" requires you to download the entire program--not just a patch--and then restart everything. Read more...
Hackers maybe plotting weekend attack against Sony
As Sony is in the final stages of getting the PlayStation Network back online, a new threat may be emerging. People with knowledge of the IRC chat room where hackers have been congregating to discuss the attacks are discussing a new effort, CNET reported late Thursday.