Google repaints a fence for Mark Twain’s birthday
If Mark Twain — also known as Samuel Clemens — were alive today, he would be celebrating his 176th birthday right now. But since the author isn't around to blow out candles or eat cake, Google is marking the occasion by putting some of his beloved characters onto its homepage. Read more...
Anonymous and Team Poison form alliance to steal from rich, give to poor
Throughout history, there have been a few good-hearted thieves who’ve stolen the hearts and minds of the public — in addition to the physical objects they’ve swiped. Top among them, of course, if Robin Hood. Now, a new gang of Merry Men is setting out to help the 99% through similar tactics.
The world’s two most widely-recognized hacking collectives, Anonymous and Team P0is0n, are joining forces. Their target: the same banks, coporations, and members of the 1% who inspired the #Occupy movement. They’re kicking off the campaign — which is being called #OpRobinHood — under the assumed name of p0isAnon (we see what they did there). Their goal is clear: steal from the rich and give to the poor. Read more...
Lawmaker dissatisfied with Amazon’s answers on Kindle Fire’s data harvesting
Amazon told a Massachusetts congressman that the Silk browser in its Kindle Fire tablet doesn't pose a privacy threat to consumers, but the lawmaker wasn't ready to give the online retailer a pass.
Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), the co-chairman of a congressional caucus on consumer privacy, on Tuesday released the retailer's responses to questions he had put to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos in October about Silk and the data it collected.
Markey wasn't happy with Amazon's answers.
"Amazon's responses to my inquiries do not provide enough detail about how the company intends to use customer information, beyond acknowledging that the company uses this valuable information," said Markey in a statement. Read more...
Former Apple subsidiary loses patent spat with HTC
The US International Trade Commission (ITC) has ruled that HTC does not infringe on patents held by former Apple subsidiary FlashPoint Technology.
FlashPoint complained to the ITC about IP relating to digital cameras in the Taiwanese smartphone-maker's products.
An initial ruling by an ITC judge back in July found no violation and the rest of the commission backed that up yesterday.
"The Commission has determined to affirm the judge’s determination of no violation of Section 337 with respect to the ’769 patent on the bases that (1) the accused HTC Android smartphones and the accused HTC Windows Phone 7 (WP7) smartphones do not infringe the ’769 patent, and (2) respondent has established that it has an implied license to practice the ’769 patent with respect to the accused WP7 smartphones," the ITC ruling (PDF) read. Read more...
Is Microsoft spin masking slow sales for Office 365?
Microsoft hasn't spilled the beans about Office 365 sales, but the little information we do have makes it sound to me as if the cloud suite isn't doing well at all.
In spite of a spate of minor announcements yesterday, Group Product Manager Andrew Kisslo announced on the Office 365 blog, "Just five months after its release, Office 365 is being adopted eight times faster than its predecessor."
Keep in mind that Office 365's predecessor is BPOS -- and BPOS didn't exactly get off to a dizzying start. Back in 2007 and 2008, Microsoft hosted Exchange and SharePoint in an ad hoc way. Microsoft didn't give the service a name until November 2008, when an amalgamation of Exchange and SharePoint was packaged and sold as Microsoft Online Services, a precursor to BPOS. Microsoft has never divulged how many BPOS customers it signed on in the five months after its launch, but the number of organizations using Microsoft-hosted servers in April 2009 certainly wasn't stunning. Read more...
Startup Agari debuts security services to stop fake email, phishing attacks
Startup Agari debuts today with cloud-based email security services aimed at allowing enterprises and e-commerce companies to identify and block fake and spoofed email exploiting their legitimate business domain names to conduct scams and phishing attacks.
Facebook and YouSendIt are among the early adopters of the Agari technology, according to Patrick Peterson, founder and CEO of the company, which is based in Palo Alto.
"They understood how email identity is being abused," says Peterson, who adds the Agari service allows Facebook, for example, to set policy controls and automatically block fake email attempting to exploit Facebook's legitimate domain names used for email. Read more...
Obama wants feds to digitize all records
President Obama this week gave government agencies four months to come up with a plan to improve records management by moving to electronic records management systems "where feasible."
In a memorandum, Obama said one aim of the plan is to improve public access to government records by moving them to the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), which will "provide the prism through which future generations will understand and learn from our actions and decisions."
Paul Wester, chief records officer for the U.S. Government, said in an interview with Computerworld that the president's directive is really about driving a more open government where citizens can access information in a more "Web 2.0" format. Read more...
Hackers launch millions of Java exploits, says Microsoft
Hackers continue to launch attacks exploiting vulnerabilities in Oracle's Java software in record numbers, Microsoft said Monday.
Citing research from a recent report, Tim Rains, a director in the company's Trustworthy Computing group, said that up to half of all attacks detected and blocked by Microsoft's security software over a 12-month period were Java exploits.
Altogether, Microsoft stopped more than 27 million Java exploits from mid-2010 through mid-2011.
Most of those exploits targeted long-ago-patched vulnerabilities, said Rains.
The most commonly-blocked Java attacks -- to the tune of over 2.5 million of them -- in the first half of 2011 exploited a bug disclosed in March 2010 and patched by Oracle the same month. Second on the popularity chart for the full 12-month stretch was an exploit of a bug patched in early December 2008, nearly three years ago. Read more...
How devops can help speed application development
Devops, an emerging concept in application development circles, is, at heart, a simple idea. It refers to the practice of aligning an organization's developmental environment more closely with its operational environment so developers will better know what changes to make to an application, based on performance metrics and feedback from administrators.
While such an idea may appear obvious, large organizations have tended to keep their developers apart from the operational folks who use the software. "Years ago, developers would make software and shrink-wrap it, and system administrators were left alone to figure out how to effectively deploy it, upgrade it, and scale it," said Tom Limoncelli, a co-chairman for this year's Usenix LISA (Large Installation System Administration) conference, which will feature a number of talks that explore the devops concept. Read more...
Microsoft expected to trumpet Office 365 momentum on Tuesday
Microsoft on Tuesday is expected to tout what it considers strong momentum in the adoption of its Office 365 cloud-hosted collaboration and communication suite, particularly among small companies that previously were unable to afford on-premise implementations of Exchange and SharePoint, according to people familiar with the announcement.
It will likely trumpet strong sales of Office 365 among organizations with 50 or fewer employees, a segment that has historically been dominated by Google Apps in the market for cloud-based collaboration and communication suites.
Microsoft may also announce a number of product improvements to Office 365 across the board, including the availability of mobile client software for its Lync Online component, which offers instant messaging, online meetings, audio and video communications, these people said. Read more...
riminals sabotaging Cyber Monday, security experts warn
Security experts today warned consumers of a rapidly mutating spam campaign using bogus messages from United Parcel Service (UPS) claiming that a package could not be delivered.
The spam run, which actually began earlier this month, is just one way that security researchers believe criminals will exploit the holiday season online buying spree.
According to Cloudmark engineering director Angela Knox, the UPS-based scam uses phony email to dupe recipients into either opening an attachment or clicking on a link to infect machines with malware. Read more...
True Or False? Automatic Fact-Checking Coming To The Web – Complications Follow
The social layer has settled on the web like a dusting of multicolored snowflakes, gracing every story with a little menagerie of sharing counts and buttons. Once basic standards of content publishing were established, basic standards of sharing had to be as well, the internet being as it is a medium of information transmission. First you get the content, then you move it around. We’re still working on the moving around part.
Another layering we’ve seen is the layering of the internet onto the real world. Location-based networking, maps, deals, all that. As soon as we had the ability to tell the world where we were, that information was naturally integrated into our services.
Yet another combination is emerging: the layering of reference and context onto the information you read. What this even comprises is difficult to say exactly, but MIT Media Lab grad student Daniel Schultz (@slifty) has one idea: a browser script that automatically checks what you’re reading against reliable, substantiated facts. It’s a simple idea with innumerable approaches, problems, and implications — which means we’ll probably be dealing with it for a long time. Read more...
EU data protection reform to replace national laws
The European Union wants to replace a mishmash of national laws on data protection with one bloc-wide reform, updating laws put in place long before Facebook and other social networking sites even existed.
EU Justice Commissioner Viviane Reding said Monday that social networks must become more open about how they operate. Under her proposals, businesses — including Internet service providers — would have additional responsibilities, such as having to inform users of what data about them is being collected, for what purpose, and how it is stored. Read more...