British hackers get jail terms
Two separate and very different cases in the UK saw hackers receive jail terms of twelve and eighteen months. In one case a 21-year old British man, Gareth Crosskey of West Sussex, plead guilty to hacking into a US citizen's Facebook account and gaining access to that person's email account in January 2011. The Metropolitan Police Service's Police Central e-Crime Unit (PCeU) was informed of the breach via the FBI and arrested Crosskey in July 2011 under the Computer Misuse Act. The PCeU says that "By taking swift action" it was "able to quickly detain Crosskey thereby preventing further disruption to the victim", and says it hopes the prosecution acts as a deterrent. Read more...
Enterprise BI models undergo radical transformation
About two years ago, CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield implemented a self-service business intelligence platform to aggregate and analyze vast amounts of data from multiple repositories scattered throughout the company.
The technology, from Palo Alto, Calif.-based QlikTech, was brought in as a supplement to a project management product from CA Technologies. So far, it has saved CareFirst $10 million in project costs and helped the health insurer reduce the number of outside contractors it uses by 25%.
Activities that used to take up to 18 months are now accomplished in less than two days. Moreover, the project management office no longer has to depend on its centralized analytics team to run BI reports. Read more...
Apple Said To Debut iCloud’s New Photo Sharing Features At WWDC
With Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference just weeks away, expect plenty of reports of new features to come crawling out of the woodwork. In fact, here’s one from the Wall Street Journal — they claim that Apple has been doing some major tinkering with their iCloud storage service, the fruits of which will be unveiled on June 11.
First up is the ability for users to share and comment on each other’s photos, a pretty dramatic shift away from iCloud’s current approach to photo storage. As it stands, each user has a single Photo Stream meant mostly to make sure images are on the devices they need to be on. This shift in sharing actually sounds a little reminiscent of Apple’s recently-killed MobileMe service, though how exactly the sharing process would play out within iCloud is still up in the air. Read more...
Nine Windows 7 keyboard shortcuts everyone should know
There’s nothing wrong with a mouse cursor, but for many tasks keyboard shortcuts are far more efficient than picking your hands up off the keyboard and pointing then clicking. Most users can name at least a few combinations off the top of their heads, and almost everyone knows the infamous Ctrl+Alt+Delete, but many of the best shortcuts are tragically overlooked.
So to round out your keyboard navigating skills, here are nine combos that every Windows 7 user should know. Read more...
7 Startups Launch Out Of NewMe Accelerator’s Spring 2012 Demo Day [TCTV]
The NewMe Accelerator, a startup incubation program founded last year aimed at under-represented minorities in the tech world (namely African Americans, Latinos, and women), held its second-ever Demo Day today for its latest class of entrepreneurs.
A total of seven startups presented their wares to a packed room full of investors, reporters, and fellow entrepreneurs at Google’s downtown San Francisco office — the energy was high and the crowd’s response seemed really strong. TechCrunch TV was on site, and you can watch the video embedded above to get a look at the general demo day scene and see our interview with NewMe’s founder Angela Benton about the program’s growth so far and its plans for the future. Read more...
Apple’s WWDC sells out in 2 hours
Apple today announced that its annual developers conference would run June 11-15 in San Francisco. And inside of two hours, Apple said the event had sold out.
Tickets for the five-day Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) were again priced at $1,599, the same as for the last two years' confabs.
The quick sell-out wasn't a shock: A year ago, Apple exhausted supplies in under 12 hours, a huge acceleration over 2010, when tickets were available for eight days. Read more...
Appvetica turns the iPhone and iPod Touch into a controller for Wii-like iPad gaming
While there’s no doubt that tablets are becoming a huge market for gaming, the touch screen interface provides a number issues for both gamers, who want a quality experience, and developers who have to adapt to a control-pad-free environment.
However, one Polish startup is giving developers the tools to provide a more functional gaming experience and free your thumbs. Read more...
Google boosts Web bug bounties to $20,000
Google today dramatically raised the bounties it pays independent researchers for reporting bugs in its core websites, services and online applications.
The search giant boosted the maximum reward from $3,133 to $20,000, and added a $10,000 payment to the program.
The Vulnerability Reward Program (VRP) will now pay $20,000 for vulnerabilities that allow remote code execution against google.com, youtube.com and other core domains, as well as what the company called "highly sensitive services" such as its search site, Google Wallet, Gmail and Google Play.
Remote code flaws found in Google's Web apps will also be rewarded $20,000. Read more...
Major Book Publisher Demands Jury Trial Against BitTorrent Pirates
John Wiley & Sons, one of the world’s largest book publishers, is continuing its efforts to crack down on BitTorrent piracy. The company has now named several people who allegedly shared Wiley titles online, and is demanding a jury trial against them. If these actually go ahead it will be the first time that BitTorrent-related evidence is tested in a US court.
Last fall, John Wiley and Sons became the first book publisher to go after BitTorrent users in the US.
By filing a mass-BitTorrent lawsuit the company followed mostly in the footsteps of several movie studios, who together have sued more than 250,000 people in the US since early 2010. And the publisher didn’t stop at just one.
In recent months Wiley has filed more than a dozen mass BitTorrent lawsuits involving a few hundred John Doe defendants in total. The Does are all accused of sharing digital copies of titles including “WordPress for Dummies,” Hacking for Dummies” and “Day Trading for Dummies.” Read more...
New Mac malware exploits old Java hole
Security specialist Sophos reports that it has discovered new Mac malware which exploits the same Java hole in Mac OS X that was also used by the "Flashback" malware and has since been closed by Apple. The backdoor trojan is called "OSX/Sabpab-A" and is said to establish a HTTP connection to a command & control server once it has infected a computer. According to Sophos's Graham Cluley, attackers then have the ability to execute arbitrary commands, upload and download files, and take screenshots on infected systems. Read more...
Sencha Architect 2′s new GUI makes mobile app development visual
Sencha has introduced Architect 2, a cross-platform development tool for HTML5-based mobile and desktop apps that aims to make it easier to create applications with the help of a new graphical user interface, the company said on Tuesday.
Architect 2 is an upgrade of Sencha's Ext Designer. But early on, the company decided it didn't want to develop just another interface designer, but a complete application builder, where the architecture and the interface of an app could be created and properly structured for development. Read more...
Who Wants To Come To The TechCrunch Mini Meet-Up In NYC?
So, I’ve just recuperated from our VA mini meet-up tour, during which John and I visited DC, Norfolk, and Richmond in an attempt to find startup gems in unexpected corners of the country. This time we’re bringing things a little bit closer to home.
That’s right New Yawkers: get your pitch in order, your demo up to snuff, and throw on your schmoozing hat! We’re having a meet-up in the Big Apple, and if you aren’t there, you’re probably shaped like a box. Read more...
As IT picks up the pace, can tech workers keep up?
There's good news and bad news on the salary front for IT professionals this year. With many businesses enjoying renewed growth following an extended period of economic gloom, IT workers saw another year of modest salary increases, and they reported significantly fewer pay cuts, hiring freezes and layoffs.
That's the good news.
The bad news is that tech professionals are working hard for every penny they bring home -- so hard that in many cases the extra workload outweighs the small boost in pay. Read more...
Computer science enrollments rise again by 10%
Interest in computer science continues to grow among undergrad students, who pushed enrollments up nearly 10% in the 2011-12 academic year. This marks the fourth straight year of increases.
The numbers might have been even higher if not for enrollment caps that some schools have put in place because they don't have enough faculty members, equipment or classrooms to meet demand, according to the Computing Research Association (CRA), which conducts the annual Taulbee survey.
"We don't have a way to gauge -- at least in the current survey -- how many students wanted to be admitted," said Peter Harsha, the CRA's director of government affairs. The association reported a 10% enrollment gain last year as well.
The steady gain in enrollments is a turnabout from what happened after the tech bubble burst in 2001. Read more...
Cisco Jawbreaker: Refocused or retired?
So with word circulating around the industry of a possible Cisco spin-in developing a cloudy switch for SDN (software-defined networking) and/or distributed data storage, what's the status of Cisco's "Jawbreaker" fabric switching project?
Sources in the fabric and SDN industry say Jawbreaker, which was to be a merchant silicon-based response to Juniper's QFabric, has either been:
- Refocused toward the enterprise campus as a Catalyst switch adjunct
- Repositioned into Insieme, the not-so-stealthy startup spin-in run by Cisco's top three engineers -- Mario Mazzola, Luca Cafiero and Prem Jain
- Or killed entirely due to the apparent challenges Juniper's facing with QFabric. QFabric's lengthy trial and ramp cycle no longer requires a competitive marketing response from Cisco, some sources believe.