Biz bods: Tile-tastic Windows 8? NOOO. We lust after ‘mature’ Win 7
Windows 8 won't become an enterprise IT standard as customers dump Microsoft's legacy PC operating system XP. Instead, corporate IT departments will stick to what they know and install Windows 7.
That’s according to technology analyst Forrester, which reckoned Windows 7 is fast becoming the de-facto PC operating system for big businesses shifting users off Windows XP. Redmond plans to pull the plug on support for XP less than a year from now, on 8 April 2014.
Just over six months after Microsoft launched its new operating system, Windows 8 isn’t even showing up on company-issued PCs, while 48 per cent of PCs are running Windows 7, according to the Forrester report, IT will skip Windows 8 as the Enterprise Standard. Read more...
Microsoft conceals job ad in Bing homepage
Microsoft are looking for a new Bing developer - but you'll need to be pretty smart to apply. Oh, and you can only use Internet Explorer, which rules a fair number of applicants out.
Visitors to the Bing homepage are currently greeted with a weird blue environment of some sort as the background to the search bar. But rich rewards are on offer for the searcher who looks beyond the surface of the blue-and-grey floatyness.
If you're using Internet Explorer and have enabled the browser debug settings*, a small message pops up containing the words: "Do you want to debug this webpage?" Read more...
Mozilla postpones default blocking of third-party cookies in Firefox
Mozilla has postponed blocking third-party cookies by default in Firefox 22, "to collect and analyze data on the effect of blocking some third-party cookies."
The nonprofit organization is, however, not softening its stand on protecting privacy and putting users first, Brendan Eich, Mozilla's CTO and senior vice president of engineering, wrote in a blog post Thursday.
Mozilla has been testing a patch from Jonathan Mayer, a graduate student at Stanford University in computer science and law and online privacy activist, which like Apple's Safari browser allows cookies from websites already visited, but blocks cookies from sites not visited yet. Read more...
How to keep the feds from snooping on your cloud data
A cottage industry is growing up around virtual padlocks that consumers can place on cloud services so that the vendors themselves can't get to the information -- even if the government requests access.
And in recent years there have been a lot of those government requests for access from storage-as-a-service providers.
For example, Google regularly receives requests from governments and courts around the world to hand over user data. Last year, it received 21,389 government requests for information affecting 33,634 user accounts. Sixty-six percent of the time, Google said it provided at least some data in response. Read more...
China’s internet security giant Qihoo planning global domination
Controversial Chinese software vendor Qihoo 360 has its eyes on world domination after controversial founder Zhou Hongyi told the local press he wants to turn the firm into the planet’s biggest web security biz.
Qihoo made its name flogging free AV to bargain-seeking Chinese punters and has since gone on to build a successful business around products in several related areas including web browsing, search and internet portals.
Never one to resist an opportunity to engage in some blatant self promotion, Zhou was quoted in the Changjiang Daily News late last week arguing that just as products made in China are now sold throughout the world, so his firm should take the freemium web security model global. Read more...
Microsoft admits zero-day bug in IE8, pledges patch
Microsoft late Friday confirmed that a "zero-day," or unpatched, vulnerability exists in Internet Explorer 8 (IE8), the company's most popular browser.
According to multiple security firms, the vulnerability has been used in active exploits, including "watering hole"-style attacks against the U.S. Department of Labor and U.S. Department of Energy, targeting workers at the latter agency involved in nuclear weapons research.
On Friday, Microsoft published a security advisory that acknowledged the bug. In the advisory, the company also said that other versions of Internet Explorer, including the newer IE9 and IE10, are not affected, and that the firm is working on an update to patch the problem. Read more...
Japan’s XP migration solution: Remove network cable
A Japanese local government has come up with a rather unusual solution to the problem of Windows XP migration – keep the venerable OS but disconnect the remaining PCs running it from the internet.
In around a year’s time, April 8 2014 to be precise, Microsoft will end free support for the operating system which is still installed on around a third of machines in the Land of the Rising Sun.
This will mean an end to free security patches and fixes for knackered code – exposing organisations to a host of potential info-security risks. Read more...
Facebook rethinks its ‘hackathons’ with an eye toward mobile
Facebook is retooling its famous "hackathon" all-night coding workshops to give engineers more time to conceive new products, hopefully with a focus on mobile.
The hackathons, a longstanding event at the company where "hacking" is central to the corporate mantra, have previously run as anything-goes, all-night workshops in which employees think up new product concepts and develop rough prototypes. If they impress, those prototypes sometimes end up as commercial products.
Some of Facebook's most popular features, including the "Like" button, Timeline and Chat, were conceived during hackathons, so they play an important role. Read more...
CBS tunes in to open source, cloud
Ring in open source and cloud apps, ring out old packaged software. That's the message relayed by Peter Yared, CTO for CBS Interactive, at this week's open source-focused Open Business Conference in San Francisco. And on a related software front, broadcasting giant CBS says it is not caving to patent trolls and is instead choosing to give them a fight.
"We love open source" and run a ton of it, Yared said. CBS Interactive, which includes CBS Web properties, has utilized open source software including the Apache Hadoop distributed computing system and the MySQL database. Read more...
New Google Play terms ban non-store app updates
Google has amended the policies of its Play app store for Android to prohibit third-party app update mechanisms, in a move seemingly designed to put the kibosh on a contentious feature being tested by Facebook.
As of Friday, the "Dangerous Products" section of the Chocolate Factory's Google Play Developer Program Policies - which prohibits such things as Trojans, viruses, and spyware - now includes an additional sentence:
An app downloaded from Google Play may not modify, replace or update its own APK binary code using any method other than Google Play's update mechanism. Read more...
Sencha CEO: Treat HTML5 apps as a programming platform, not a Web page
Sencha provides tools for buildings Web applications to run on a variety of devices, including tablets, mobile phones, and laptops with touchscreens. Focused on HTML5, Sencha's products include its Sencha Touch mobile application development framework. InfoWorld Editor at Large Paul Krill recently met with Sencha CEO Michael Mullany to discuss the mobile application landscape, sizing up native versus Web development, and emerging platforms, including Tizen and Firefox OS. Read more...
DDoS suspect used a van as a mobile office, Spanish police say
The man suspected of participating in a large DDoS attack on an antispam organization that caused intermittent Internet hiccups drove around Spain in a van he used as a mobile office, Spain's Interior Ministry said Sunday.
The van was equipped with "various antennas" that were used to scan frequencies, the ministry said in a news release. On Thursday, Spanish police arrested a 35-year-old Dutch man in Barcelona suspected of conducting cyberattacks against Spamhaus, a nonprofit group that develops widely used lists of networks identified as sending spam. Read more...
Bellevue College looks to online software to help autistic students collaborate
Bellevue College in Washington has deployed online learning software to help students with autism improve their small-group collaboration skills.
Fifty Bellevue students in an Autism Spectrum Navigators program have been taking advantage of a discussion board feature inside Canvas, a learning management system from start-up Instructure.
The Navigators program, now nearing the end of its second full year, has deployed the Canvas software for the past year, giving Bellevue students and teachers access to assignments, grades and other materials as well as collaboration through text, audio and video from desktops, tablets and even smartphones and tablets.
"We've had Canvas this entire year and we've seen a lot more confidence and interaction with students," Sara Gardner, manager of the Navigator program, said in an interview. "We use a social justice model instead of a medical one [for dealing with autism], so we aren't aren't trying to fix our students and rather are trying to use the technology to put students together to communicate better and...support them with skills." Read more...
Apple to stage ‘Tech Talks’ roadshow
After selling out its worldwide developer conference (WWDC) at a speed usually reserved for hit counters on Psy videos, Apple has hinted that those who want to get up close and technical with it will soon be served locally.
We're working on the basis of the tiniest of hints here, as the company has issued a statement about the WWDC sellout that offers this tiny, wee nugget of information: Read more...