Many companies likely affected by hack of popular iOS developer forum
The administrators of a popular iOS developer Web forum called iPhoneDevSDK confirmed Wednesday that it had been compromised by hackers who used it to launch attacks against its users. Security experts believe the site served as a gateway for the recent attacks against Twitter, Facebook, and Apple employees and that many other companies might be affected as well.
At the beginning of February, Twitter announced that it had been the target of an attack and that hackers might have accessed authentication data on 250,000 users.
"This attack was not the work of amateurs, and we do not believe it was an isolated incident," Twitter said at the time. "The attackers were extremely sophisticated, and we believe other companies and organizations have also been recently similarly attacked." Read more...
Microsoft: Office 2013 license is for just one PC, FOREVER
Microsoft has clarified the licensing for retail versions of its Office 2013 productivity suite, confirming that boxed editions of the software are licensed for a single PC only and that the license may never be transferred, even if the user upgrades to a new PC.
Over the past week, Office users around the web have expressed dismay over new, draconian-sounding terms in the Office 2013 retail license that seem to severely curb what customers can do with the software. Specifically, this paragraph raised the most eyebrows:
You may not transfer the software to another computer or user. You may transfer the software directly to a third party only as installed on the licensed computer, with the Certificate of Authenticity label and this agreement. Before the transfer, that party must agree that this agreement applies to the transfer and use of the software. You may not retain any copies. Read more...
IT headcount expected to rise in Q4
More CIOs are planning to expand their IT departments in the coming quarter than were three months ago. But compared to other professions, projected IT hiring in Q4 lags behind fields such as legal, sales, and marketing, according to new data from Robert Half Technology.
In the staffing firm's latest IT Hiring Index and Skills Report, 9 percent of CIOs said they plan to expand their IT departments in Q4, and 6 percent anticipate cutbacks. The net 3 percent increase in anticipated IT hiring is up two percentage points from last quarter's survey. For Q4, the remaining 83 percent of CIOs polled said they'll maintain current staffing levels.
By industry, CIOs in the transportation sector anticipate the most hiring, with a net 15 percent planning to expand their IT departments. Read more...
IT spending to grow in 2012 despite economic woes, says IDC
Worldwide IT spending remains on course to grow by 6 percent in 2012 despite the grim economic situation in Europe, thanks to strong software, storage, smartphone and tablet sales, according to IDC.
While 2012 has been a tough year for many IT vendors, they have done better overall than many expected in the first half of the year, IDC said.
For example, software spending has been robust, even in parts of the world where the economy has been weakest, as businesses hope software tools and applications will help them implement cost-reduction strategies.
The 6 percent growth compares to a 7 percent increase in worldwide IT spending last year. IDC expects 6 percent growth in 2013. Read more...
Job ad seeks ‘mediocre’ developers
Are you just scraping by coding in Ruby? Are you not prepared to pull infinite all-nighters? Are you less than amazingly fast?
If you answered yes to any or all of the above, worry not: Melbourne, Australia, company Flippa has advertised for “Mediocre Ruby Devs”.
The ad is not entirely serious, as Flippa does want good developers. But the company finds it hard to hire Ruby experts in the busy Melbourne market and decided honesty would be the best policy.
“Our problem is not having too many applicants,” says Flippa's General Manager Dave Slutzkin. “It's having too few.” That's why the company's job ad explains: Read more...
Money can’t buy open-source love… only code can
Money can't buy you happiness, but Meteor, a web-apps startup focused on enterprise app development, seems to think it can buy it an open-source community.
Instead of the standard startup funding announcement, proclaiming that the company will use its funding for product development, marketing and so on, Meteor says it "will use the money to build the open source community around its offerings."
Is that so? Who knew all you needed for an open-source community was $11.2m in venture funding?
This may be a bit harsh. After all, Meteor's board is filled with people who understand that money can't buy a community. David Skok invested in and helped to build JBoss's commercial business. Rod Johnson built up a massive, two-million strong Spring community. Peter Levine also has an open-source pedigree, having run XenSource until its acquisition by Citrix.
But guess what? In exactly zero of those cases did venture money buy a community. The opposite, in fact, happened. Read more...
Well-funded Meteor poised to impact web development
The developers behind the Meteor open source project say they want to revolutionize how applications are built, and they've just been handed a whopping $11.2m in Series A funding to do it.
Meteor is an open source platform for building web applications with rich user interfaces that run on the client rather than the server – applications like Gmail, Twitter, Quora, or the Facebook photo viewer, for example. This is a style of software that Meteor's Matt DeBergalis says is becoming the new norm.
"Today's users expect and demand that quality of an app," DeBergalis tells The Reg, "but for the typical developer it's out of reach."
Meteor, he says, allows even "weekend coders" to build complete, functioning browser-based applications in a matter of days. Read more...
Oops: Nokia reinstates ‘terminated’ star app developer
You may think Nokia needs to keep all the app developers it can muster loyal to the company - but last week it terminated VIP privileges for a star Symbian programmer. Nokia has since changed its mind.
The brains behind the highly regarded Gravity application, Jan Ole Suhr, was one of a number of Symbian coders who discovered their membership of the Nokia Developer Champions programme had been terminated early. This is a scheme that recognises key programmers and gives them early access to tools and technical information.
But Symbian - the mobile phone operating system now officially known as "Nokia Belle" - is no more: there are no future handsets on the drawing board, and just a small fraction of the 3,000 Nokia engineers who worked on the platform are actively developing Symbian at Accenture. Nokia spun them out last year. Read more...
Nicira: A classic Silicon Valley story, complete with big payday
Nicira is a start-up right out of the Silicon Valley playbook with a $1.26 billion ending, in just five years.
VMware's decision, announced Monday, to buy this network virtualization company will likely be cited as a starring example of why Silicon Valley remains the world's engine of innovation.
The sale has all the classic elements of a Silicon Valley start-up. Whether Nicira can deliver on its promise is now up to VMware, which must make its new technology work with everything else it sells, say analysts. But for the Nicira's founders and investors, their big day has arrived.
Networking virtualization technology is to virtualization what server virtualization was to servers seven or more years ago. It's still new, its market size is still small, but it will grow rapidly because this technology is needed, say analysts. Nicira seemed perfectly timed for it. Read more...
Indian outsourcers Infosys outsource to WISCONSIN
Indian outsourcing company Infosys has set up a new software centre in Wisconsin, and a much bigger one in Bangalore. The new American office will service a Harley Davidson contract and will house 125 staffers in the MidWest. The new Bangalore office will be the base of 1,400 software engineers and developers purported to be working solely on iOS kit, although neither Infosys nor Apple would confirm this.
A Times of India report says the new centre is essentially an "Apple centre", where workers will be building iOS infrastructure, servicing the iCloud and working on application development and maintenance. Read more...
Devs can’t be bothered with Nokia’s Windows Phone – report
Interest in building applications for the current generation of Windows phones from Nokia has plummeted among developers.
Just a quarter of developers are very interested in developing apps for Windows Phone 7 devices compared to 37 per cent in the second quarter of this year, according to the latest Mobile Developer Report from IDC and Appcelerator.
The drop is blamed on "somewhat disappointing" sales of Windows Phone 7 handsets and Nokia's "widely reported competitive challenges".
Nokia sold four million Lumias in the second quarter of 2012, down 20 per cent from the year before. Read more...
Oracle NetBeans equipped with static analysis
For the newest release of NetBeans, Oracle has equipped the open-source IDE (integrated development environment) to continuously run a static analysis tool, which could point out possible coding errors to developers as they write their programs.
NetBeans 7.2, released Tuesday, also includes performance improvements and support for the latest languages and associated technologies.
For this release, NetBeans includes FindBugs, a static analysis tool for Java programs. Static analysis inspects program code for possible errors or defects, reporting errors and suggesting possible fixes to the developer. A popular debugger, FindBugs has been downloaded more than 2 million times, its creators estimate. Developers will be able to scan their applications to identify coding problems, getting the results directly within the IDE. FindBugs has long been offered as a plug-in, but this is the first version of NetBeans to include the software as part of its core package, according to Oracle. Read more...
IT spending is top board-level priority
Corporate boards are prioritizing IT spending as highly as investments in sales operations, according to research announced Monday by analyst firm Gartner.
IT and sales were tied as the top two priorities among 175 board members, mostly in the U.S. and U.K., polled in March and April for the Gartner-Forbes 2012 Board of Directors Survey. Sixty-four percent said IT spending would rise during their companies' fiscal 2012.
Calling board members' attitudes "forward-looking and proactive," Gartner vice president and distinguished analyst Jorge Lopez added that more than half of the survey respondents said they are preparing for a market recession. "It underlines the fact that the investments they plan to make are essential to growth and even survival," he said in a press statement. Read more...
New York leads in H-1B demand
The New York metropolitan area has the highest demand for H-1B workers in the United States, according to a new study that examines regional use of the work visa.
That's followed by Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Jose and Washington metropolitan areas, according to a Brookings Institution study that maps H-1B visa usage around the country.
The study's broader mission is to explain how H-1B workers are used, where they are used, and what companies use them in 106 metropolitan areas.
Take the Columbus, Ind., metro area, for instance. That area had 629 H-1B visa requests in 2010 and 2011. The top visa employer in Columbus is Cummins Inc., an engine manufacturing company.
As part of the study, Neil Ruiz, a senior policy analyst at Brookings and co-author of the report, interviewed officials at Cummings who told him that they need skilled workers to help develop clean technologies for engines. "They are really struggling to fill a lot of their positions," said Ruiz. Read more...
OSCON: Akiban targets MySQL users with its new database software
To generate interest from developers, Boston-based Akiban Technologies has released as open source its flagship database software, called Akiban Server. The company also released a connector for replicating a MySQL database within Akiban, and it has forged a partnership with platform hosting provider Engine Yard.
"The data that we capture grows more and more complicated. We designed a database that can handle increasing levels of depth and complexity," said Ori Herrnstadt, who is a cofounder and Chief Technology Officer for Akiban.
The company announced the release at OSCON (O'Reilly Open Source Conference), being held this week in Portland, Oregon.
Through a novel way of grouping data, the Akiban database can complete operations 10 or more times faster than MySQL, the company has claimed. It also provides developers multiple ways for their applications to work with the database. Read more...