Nokia releases Windows Phone update for Lumia 800 and 710
Nokia has started rolling out a Windows Phone software update for the Lumia 800 and the Lumia 710, which includes Wi-Fi tethering and a feature that silences incoming calls and messages when the phone is turned face down, the company said in a blog post on Wednesday.
Owners of the Lumia 800 and the Lumia 710 may not be getting Windows Phone 8, but that doesn't mean new features won't be added to the smartphones.
Just like on other smartphone operating systems, Wi-Fi tethering -- or Internet sharing as Nokia calls it -- turns the Lumia 800 and the Lumia 710 into a mobile Wi-Fi hotspot. Users can share their mobile Internet connection over Wi-Fi with up to five other mobile devices or computers, according to Nokia. Read more...
GOP Senators revise cybersecurity bill
A group of Republican senators on Wednesday introduced a revised version of a previously proposed bill that seeks to enhance cybersecurrity by improving the sharing of information between private industry and government.
The new Strengthening and Enhancing Cybersecurity by Using Research, Education, Information and Technology Act (SECURE IT) is being put forth as a less regulatory alternative to another Senate bill, the Cybersecurity Act, which was introduced earlier this year by Senate Democrats.
The main difference between the two bills is that, unlike the Democratic version, the Republican version does not give any new regulatory authority to the federal government to set cybersecurity standards. The new version of SECURE IT also restricts the purposes for which government can retain and use information about cyberthreats. Read more...
Silicon Valley’s top threat is China, survey finds
A significant number of high-level technology executives appear to believe Silicon Valley's days as the world's innovation hub are numbered.
At least that's the findings of a KPMG survey of 668 technology business executives at $1 billion-plus companies, start-ups and venture capital firms around the world.
Of those surveyed by the audit, tax and advisory firm, 44% believe it's likely that the "technology innovation center of the world," now in Silicon Valley, will shift to another country in the next four years.
The most likely choice among respondents is China. Read more...
Half the team at the heart of the RBS disaster WERE in India
Cost-cutting RBS management had halved the team within which the banking group's recent data disaster happened, sources have told The Register. The sacked British employees were replaced by staff in India, and there had been concerns about the quality of the work done in India for a lengthy period prior to last week's catastrophe.
Mishandling of batch schedule data while backing out of an update to CA-7 batch processing software last week caused the disruption that led to 16.9 million customers at RBS, Natwest and Ulsterbank being frozen out of their accounts for days, and ongoing issues in some cases.
The actual CA-7 software support team is wholly based in the UK and according to our sources, RBS has not cut that team. Read more...
SImply nobody is rushing to beat the Microsoft licencing price hike
The expected hordes of customers gathering to renew Microsoft volume licensing agreements before the planned price hike next month failed to show up, say a bunch of reseller sources.
With the UK price list set to rise between 1.7 per cent to 25.9 per cent from 1 July, the software maker and partners reckoned on a mad rush from customers seeking to commit early to a renew agreements and avoid the increased costs.
Microsoft first gave resellers notice in February that it would align EU prices to the euro. In May it previewed the potential impact, which initially ranged from 7.5 per cent to 33.4 per cent before the currency weakened against sterling. Read more...
Google claims Chrome is the world’s most popular browser
Google has been shouting the praises of its newly patched Chrome on the second day of its I/O developer conference, and is claiming that Chrome is undoubtedly the world's most popular browser.
"According to all the metrics and everything we see out there, Chrome most is the most popular browser," said Sundar Pichai, VP of Chrome applications, during his opening keynote presentation.
Pichai said Chrome is now being regularly used by 310 million people, doubling the number of users announced at last year's conference. Over 60 billion words are typed every day on Chrome browsers, he said, with over a terabyte of data saved every 24 hours. Read more...
Red Hat acquiring FuseSource
Boosting its line of open-source middleware, Red Hat is in the process of acquiring open-source integration software vendor FuseSource from its parent company Progress Software. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Red Hat plans to add the FuseSource software to its JBoss portfolio of Java application server software. The software will be used to aid in integrating applications so that they can run in conjunction with one another, said Craig Muzilla, vice president and general manager of middleware at Red Hat, in a statement. Read more...
Salesforce.com hit with outage
Salesforce.com experienced system problems in a number of regions on Thursday, starting at 3:34 a.m. PDT, according to an online status page.
The problem began in Salesforce.com's NA2 instance in North America, according to a notice on the page. A subsequent note blamed a "fault" in Salesforce.com's storage tier for the issue and said it was preventing customers from accessing the service. Read more...
Cloud adoption pushes storage virtualization
About three years ago Host.net, a collocation and managed service provider, decided it was going to fully embrace the cloud as a new suite of offerings for customers. When migrating to the new service, the company wanted to use its legacy hardware infrastructure -- mostly Dell and EMC storage servers -- with new hardware that had been purchased for the upgrade. But they didn't want to be tied down to any one vendor moving forward, in case application needs or markets changed.
Host.net officials wanted to manage these storage components in a unified control panel, with the flexibility to add additional hardware in the future, if need be. The answer they found was storage virtualization. Read more...
Google pledges computing without limits in Compute Engine cloud platform
With its Google Compute Engine launched Thursday, Google is offering an IaaS (infrastructure-as-a-service) cloud for running Linux virtual machines on the same infrastructure that powers Google itself.
Unveiled at the Google I/O conference in San Francisco, the service offers scale for tasks requiring large amounts of compute power. "You can launch enormous compute clusters -- tens of thousands of cores or more" said Google's Craig McLuckie, Compute Engine product manager, in a blog post. Read more...