Microsoft warns about Social Network viruses and data theft
The next time you are prompted to enter your facebook or twitter password after clicking on some nice ad, make sure the location bar of the browser says 'facebook.com' or 'twitter.com.'
Gone are the days of alluring emails asking you to part with your bank account details to claim your million dollar prize, cyber criminals now prefer to 'hang out' at your favorite social networking site.
According to the Security Intelligence Report -- a quarterly security-related update from the World's biggest software firm Microsoft -- social networks accounted for 84.5 percent of all attempts to steal personal data from users in December 2010. Read more...
Apple App Store in danger? HTC, Nokia in court
LUXEMBOURG: Microsoft Corp and Nokia Oyj are among four technology companies to challenge Apple Inc's European Union-wide trademarks for "Appstore" and "App Store."
Microsoft, Nokia, Sony Ericsson Mobile Communications AB and HTC Corp all filed separate applications with the Alicante, Spain-based EU trademark agency seeking to invalidate Apple's trademark rights. A decision by the agency could be appealed several times, all the way up to the EU's top court in Luxembourg. Read more...
Software piracy rate in India declines to 64%, loss at $2.7 bn
NEW DELHI: While there has been an increase in the global rate of software piracy, India has shown a marginal decline in the same for the year 2010.
The commercial value of software piracy grew by 14 per cent globally last year to a record total of USD 58.8 billion. However, in India, it declined to 64 per cent from 65 per cent in 2009, according to the 2010 BSA Global Software Piracy Study .
"The trend of piracy rate decline in India is positive for the industry. End-users in India value the fact that software has been developed with great efforts. There is a need to spread awareness on piracy," Business Software Alliance Director-India Lizum Mishra said.
"A lot of end users are not clear on the legitimate and illegitimate use of software," she added. Read more...
Playstation Network (PSN) Still Down, Back Online Is TBA
PSN is still down. Gaming World Waits As PlayStation Fixes Network
Nearly three weeks after the PlayStation Network was hacked, Sony engineers are still scrambling to restore order. On Sunday, April 24th, hackers sent unwanted Easter gifts to millions of gamers all around the world, throwing off their daily routines of heroic carnage. Sony has provided little information to assuage the anxious masses.
Retailers are bearing the largest brunt of the network fallout. Units that usually fly off of the shelves by the dozens are now clogging up warehouses of electronics stores, as very few gamers are interested in laying down several hundred dollars to purchase a unit that is not currently in proper working order. Read more...
Oracle Primavera Review
Oracle Primavera P6 offers best-in-class solutions focused on the mission critical Professional Project Management (PPM) requirements of key vertical industries including engineering and construction, public sector, aerospace and defense, utilities, oil and gas, manufacturing, IT & services.
Primavera is focused exclusively on helping project-intensive businesses manage their entire project portfolio lifecycle, including projects of all sizes. It is estimated that projects totaling more than $6 trillion in value have been managed with Primavera products. Companies turn to Primavera project portfolio management solutions to help them make better portfolio management decisions, evaluate the risks and rewards associated with projects and determine whether there are sufficient resources with the right skills to accomplish the work. These best-in-class solutions provide the project execution and control capabilities needed to successfully deliver projects on time, within budget and with the intended quality and design. Read more...
Intel, partners push for cloud standards
There is no shortage of criticism about the cloud, about its lack of interoperability, fear of vendor lock-in as well as the security risks.
Its critics include Vinton Cerf, a father of the Internet and Google's chief Internet evangelist, who compares the status of cloud computing today to the early days of email.
"Today, cloud computing is like the email of the 1980s, [when] things were not interconnected, you couldn't interchange things between email (systems). {Now] you can't interchange things between clouds - that is going to change," said Cerf, at the Interop conference this week. "There will be the same pressures to get cloud systems to interoperate." Read more...
Visa’s mobile payment plan ‘most comprehensive to date’
Visa's plan to launch a digital wallet system in the U.S. and Canada this fall is by far the largest and most ambitious of any similar initiative announced by credit card processors, banks or wireless carriers.
Still, Visa faces challenges when it comes to merchant acceptance of near field communication (NFC) terminals that work with smartphones and when it comes to merchants' willingness to pay transaction fees to Visa's partner banks, analysts said.
Part of what makes the announced plan so impressive, analysts said, is that Visa is already enormous: There are 1.8 billion Visa cards in use globally. More than half of U.S. credit card transactions each year are handled by Visa. MasterCard, American Express and Discover are the next largest credit card companies. Read more...
Pirated Software Value Rises to Record High
The Business Software Alliance's annual report on software piracy for 2010 found that piracy has reached record levels, at least as far as revenue is concerned.
The BSA said that worldwide piracy now costs the industry $59 billion, a new high, with piracy concentrated in the emerging markets where PC growth is most concentrated. The central/eastern regions of Europe, as well as South and Central America, ranked the highest in terms of piracy rate, tied at 64 percent.
The commercial value of software piracy grew 14 percent from a year ago, the BSA said. Read more...
Android now, Chrome OS later. Can Google balance its platforms?
Chrome OS was the focal point for the final day of Google I/O, the annual developers conference held in San Francisco this week. While Google (GOOG) managed to dazzle attendees with forward-thinking discussions of Chrome’s potential, even revealing the Chromebook PC to run Google’s web-based operating system, there seem to be more questions than answers regarding Google’s long term platform goals. On the one hand, Android’s mobile platform has been a runaway hit, incurring a great deal of developer interest. On the other hand, Chrome OS is sneaking into the netbook market, looking to enterprise settings to re-evaluate the way we access applications. Read more...
Adobe Flash Update Puts Users in Charge of Privacy
Adobe has released an important update to its Flash Player software that fixes critical security flaws and gives users a better way of controlling whether they are being tracked on the Web.
The Flash Player 10.3 update, released Thursday, lets users manage Flash cookies using their browser's privacy settings or through a new control panel. Flash cookies, also called "Local Stored Objects," have been a sore spot for Adobe users since 2009, when researchers showed they were being used extensively to track Web surfers. The problem is that Flash cookies historically have been hard to remove, unlike traditional cookies, and some sites have used them to track users who have wanted to block cookies.
Cookies are small snippets of text, stored on the computer, that websites use to identify repeat visitors. Read more...
LimeWire, major record labels settle for $105M
File-sharing software company LimeWire, which shut down last year after being barred from allowing people to share copyright-protected files online, reached a $105 million out-of-court settlement with the major record labels Thursday, the labels said.
In a statement, Recording Industry Association of America Chairman Mitch Bainwol said his group, which represents the labels, is pleased with the settlement.
"The resolution of this case is another milestone in the continuing evolution of online music to a legitimate marketplace that appropriately rewards creators," he later added. Read more...
AOL offers video chat with no log-in, download
In a move to become more competitive in the fast-growing field of video chat, the team behind AOL Inc.'s AIM instant messenger rolled out the first version of a free video chat service on Thursday that doesn't require users to log in or download any software.
Called AV, the service was created as a way to have quick, easy video chats, Jason Shellen, a leader of the AIM team, said. Though there are plenty of other voice and video chat offerings available for computers and smartphones, AV is unlike many with its decision to eschew both logins and software downloads. Read more...
Digia to cut 190 jobs due to Nokia restructuring
Finnish software firm Digia said it would cut up to 190 jobs due to restructuring at its major client Nokia.
Digia said in a statement on Friday that the job cuts would affect staff in its mobile solutions segment and in some administrative and support functions. At the end of March, Digia employed around 1,600 people.
Nokia said in April it would axe 7,000 jobs to cut 1 billion euros ($1.42 billion) in costs as it struggles to compete in the smartphone market. The company has decided to use Microsoft software instead of its own Symbian platform.
(Source: news.yahoo.com)
Windows 7′s malware infection rate climbs, XP’s falls
Data released today by Microsoft showed that Windows 7's malware infection rate climbed by more than 30% during the second half of 2010, even as the infection rate of the 10-year-old Windows XP fell by more than 20%.
"Infection rates have jumped [for Windows 7]," admitted Jeff Williams, the principal group program manager with the Microsoft Malware Protection Center (MMPC). "We attribute that to the increased presence of malicious software attacks out there."
For the second half of 2010, 32-bit Windows 7 machines were infected at an average rate of over 4 PCs per 1,000, a 33% increase over the approximately 3-per-1,000 infection rate during the first half of the year.
PCs running the 64-bit version of Windows 7 fared slightly better, with an infection rate of 2.5 per 1,000 during all of 2010.
The infection rates were tabulated from scans conducted by the Malicious Software Removal Tool (MSRT), a free utility updated monthly and pushed to Windows users via Microsoft's update services. MSFT detects and deletes selected malware, including fake antivirus programs, worms, viruses and bot Trojans. Read more...
600,000 developers, 13 Billion API requests a day, 900,000 applications… the Twitter ecosystem is huge
Twitter‘s #devnest event in San Francisco is under way, and some incredible stats about the Twitter ecosystem are coming to light.
There are 600,000 developers working on apps that use the Twitter API, and Twitter is processing a whopping 13 billion — with a b — API requests every day.
There are 900,000 applications in the wild that integrate with Twitter.
In the first quarter of 2011, Twitter observed a 41% increase in Tweets per day, with a 38% increase in the US. Read more...