Mozilla delivers silent updating with Firefox 12 release
Mozilla today released Firefox 12, patching 14 security bugs in the browser and moving it one step closer to matching rival Chrome in silent updating.
The latest in the line of updates that have rolled off the Mozilla development line every six weeks since mid-2011, Firefox 12 fixed seven vulnerabilities labeled "critical," the highest threat ranking in Mozilla's four-step scoring, four bugs tagged "high" and three pegged "moderate." Read more...
Microsoft unveils Windows 8 ‘release preview’ for June
Windows 8 will be signed off and released to PC manufacturers in June, paving the way for a September or October launch.
Microsoft will deliver what it's calling a "release preview" of Windows 8 in the first week of June, Windows chief Steven Sinofsky has revealed.
Sinofsky announced the news at Windows 8 Dev Days in Japan, which was promptly tweeted by Microsoft’s Building Windows 8 blog, below. Read more...
CISPA sponsors support amendments addressing privacy concerns
The sponsors of a controversial cyberthreat information-sharing bill will offer new amendments to address privacy concerns, with changes focused on limiting how government agencies can use information shared by private companies, as the bill comes to a vote in the U.S. House of Representatives this week.
Sponsors of the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, or CISPA, said Tuesday they will support amendments to the legislation, including one that would narrow the way U.S. agencies can use the shared information.
The bill now allows agencies to use the information for a broad range of purposes, but the proposed amendment would limit agencies to acting on cybersecurity issues, on investigations involving potential deaths or serious injury, on investigations involving child pornography and on issues related to U.S. national security. Read more...
China’s Huawei may start selling its own mobile chips
Chinese handset maker Huawei Technologies expects its smartphone chip business will help further drive revenue, signaling that the company could try to compete in the world's mobile chip market.
"In the future, whether it be mobile broadband devices, tablets, or smartphones, Huawei will be able to provide its own core chip solution," said Huawei executive vice president Eric Xu.
He made the comment on Wednesday during the company's annual analyst summit, when asked how Huawei would grow its smartphone market share without losing money to marketing efforts.
"If we cannot make money from smartphones, we can still make money from the chipset offerings," Xu said. "If we can make money from every smartphone chip, then it will be substantial." Read more...
Intel acquires HPC interconnect assets from Cray
Intel has agreed to buy specific high-performance-computing interconnect assets from server company Cray, the chip maker said on Tuesday.
Intel gets access to Cray's "interconnect personnel and intellectual property" with the agreement, Intel said in a statement. The technology and expertise will help Intel build its high-performance-computing portfolio as it looks to scale performance on servers, Intel said.
Intel will pay $140 million for Cray's assets, Cray said in a statement. As part of the deal, 74 Cray employees will join Intel. Read more...
Schmidt says Android did not use Sun’s intellectual property
Google developed its Android smartphone software without using Sun's intellectual property and its use of Java in Android was "legally correct," Google's executive chairman, Eric Schmidt, testified in court today.
Schmidt was on the stand for day seven of the jury trial between Oracle and Google. Oracle wrapped up the copyright portion of its arguments Tuesday, allowing Google to begin its defense.
Oracle accuses Google of infringing its Java patents and copyrights in Google's Android software. Google says it did nothing wrong, and used only the parts of Java that Sun made freely available to anyone. Read more...
Why Oracle Fusion Apps customers overwhelmingly prefer cloud deployment
Most of the 250 customers that have licensed Oracle's recently launched Fusion Applications so far have chosen a SaaS deployment model instead of running it on-premises, a senior executive said this week during the Collaborate user group conference in Las Vegas.
And they are doing so "in a coexistence fashion," running Fusion alongside their existing Oracle business software, such as E-Business Suite, and looking to add more Fusion modules over time, said Chris Leone, senior vice president of applications development, during a keynote address. Read more...
Dropbox, SkyDrive or Google Drive?
Microsoft unleashed a desktop sync app for SkyDrive. Today, Google followed by finally launching Google Drive — after a series of early appearances hinted that it was going to be arriving very, very soon. So now that the dust has settled, how do the two new services stack up with the current king of cloud storage and sync, Dropbox? Let’s take a look.
Free Storage
In terms of disk space in the cloud, SkyDrive offers you the most bang for your non-buck. While there are other ways to bump up your Dropbox storage without paying, all new SkyDrive users get the full 7GB from the get-go. Better still, if you’re an existing SkyDrive user and you install the new app you’ll get a whopping 25GB at no charge. Read more...
Intel’s Ivy Bridge chips raise the bar for rivals
With the arrival of Intel's Ivy Bridge processors, the chip maker has just given its competition a new bar to shoot for.
On Monday, Intel took the wraps off its first third-generation Core processors, which have been known by their code-name, Ivy Bridge. The new chips bring Intel into the realm of 22-nanometer processing, a big step down from the 32-nm build process, which rival Advanced Micro Devices is still working with.
That means these are the first 22nm logic chips, marking a technology milestone. On top of that, the chips are faster and more power-efficient than their Core predecessors. Read more...
Flashback numbers not going down – still over half a million
Dr Web's estimate of Flashback infections
Source: Dr Web Initial reports of drops in the number of systems infected with the Flashback Mac malware are being corrected – the adjusted number is now back to around 550,000 systems. The corrections come after it was shown by Dr Web that one system among the various command and control IP addresses was halting bot scans. Flashback-infected machines randomly work through a generated range of different systems, connecting to each to check for commands. The blocking system meant that companies, like Dr Web, who set up their sinkhole servers earlier, so that they could estimate the number of infections, got to see more infected machines connecting, while sinkholes set up later saw fewer infected systems. Read more...
Man posts ex-girlfriend’s nude pics on Facebook, gets convicted
When he posted his ex-girlfriend's nude pictures on Facebook three months after their split, Ravshan ''Ronnie'' Usmanov, 20, probably wasn't thinking "Hey, this is my ticket to six months house arrest as the first social network-related conviction in Australian history!"
A similar thought probably wasn't going through the unidentified ex either when, during a happier time in their relationship, she posed for the pics: "Hey, this is my ticket to Facebook humiliation!" Read more...
High school hackers face expulsion over attendance system breach
A group of teens at a high school in Berkeley, Calif. charged fellow students between $2 and $20 to remove records of tardiness and unexcused absences from their permanent records. For a price, they'd even sell other kids the password to the attendance system, which was stolen from a member of the school's staff. Read more...
YouTube’s very first video turns 7 years old today
With a service as big as YouTube — with literally dozens of hours of new content popping up every minute — it's easy to forget how it all began. Today marks the seventh birthday of YouTube's very first clip which, like much of the site's user-generated content, is a bit humorous but almost entirely pointless. Read more...