China’s Tencent To Restructure Into Six Groups, Here’s Why
China’s Internet juggernaut Tencent announced today that it would undergo a restructuring of its business units into six groups. Ren Yuxin was also named as the new chief operating officer and will head up the media and social-networking groups.
The six groups include:
TEG – Technology & Engineering Group, comprised of Tencent Research and operating divisions.
SNG – Social Networking Group, comprised of its Internet business lines and some divisions from Tencent Research.
CBG – Creative Business Group, formed by Tencent Guangdong R&D Center and its corporate development arm. Read more...
Windows 8 ARM tablets suffering pricing problems due to Microsoft fees, report claims
According to Digitimes, original equipment manufacturers are having a hard time meeting price targets for tablets that will run Microsoft’s forthcoming Windows 8 RT operating system, which is coded for touch input.
This is no small matter. TNW has written on topic a host of times, fretting publicly that Windows 8 devices may be too expensive, and thus price themselves out of contention for mass market consumer dollars.
However, Digitimes has some encouraging figures, and some that sting. From its report [Edited and condensed by TNW]:
“[The tablets], based on estimated general BOM costs of US$300-350 for 10-inch tablet PCs and US$150-200 for 7-inch models, are struggling to meet vendors’ price targets [...] because of the additional US$90-100 fee for Windows 8.” Read more...
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...
Avast and ahoy: Google’s student doodle contest winner named!
A 7-year-old Wisconsin boy's drawing of his dream visit to the time of pirates, ships and treasure has won him the annual Doodle 4 Google competition, which means he'll get quite a bounty for it: a $30,000 college scholarship, a $50,000 technology grant for his school and the drawing itself featured on Google's U.S. home page Friday.
Second-grader Dylan Hoffman was among more than 114,000 kindergarten through senior high school students around the country who entered drawings tied to the theme of "If I could travel in time I'd visit ...."
In his submission, the Prairie School student wrote that he'd "sail a pirate ship looking for treasure, have a colorful pet parrot and enjoy beautiful sunsets from deserted islands.” His drawing shows all that and more: ingenuity incorporating the very non-pirate-era word, "Google." The annual challenge by the search giant asks students to create redesigned versions of its logo. Read more...
Verizon fumbles on “kill unlimited data plans” damage control
Yesterday, at the J.P. Morgan 40th Annual Technology, Media and Telecom Conference, Verizon EVP and CFO Frank Shammo mentioned that his company would be forcing customers away from their grandfathered unlimited data plans. The decision is purely financial: "A lot of our 3G base is unlimited. As they start to migrate into 4G, they will have to come off of unlimited and go into the data share plan. And that is beneficial for us for many reasons, obviously. So as you pick what tier you want to be and we think that there will be some price up in those tiers." Read more...
Want Facebook Shares? HK’s 8 Securities Offers $200 Worth If You Join Its Trading Platform
With Facebook announcing its ballsy stock price of $38 yesterday and all eyes now on what will happen with the social network when it finally goes public today, a new trading platform in Hong Kong, 8 Securities, is seizing the moment to boost its own profile by offering customers US$200 of Facebook shares if they sign up to trade on 8 Securities’ trading platform in the next month.
The offer indirectly serves a couple of other purposes, too: it gives non-U.S. citizens a relatively easy crack at a bit of stock in the most valuable tech IPO ever, and it raises Facebook’s Asia profile even further as people continue to wonder how Facebook might finally address one of the biggest markets in the world, China. Read more...
European Activists Could Force Facebook’s New Privacy Changes To A Worldwide Vote
The European activists “europe-v-facebook.org”, led by a group of Austrian students, say that they have reached the 7,000-comment threshold on a Facebook privacy proposal, first raised last week, which would force the company to take the revisions to a worldwide vote. Perhaps not the best timing for Facebook, but great timing for those looking for more profile on the whole issue of privacy and how it is approached by Facebook.
Specifically, if you go to Facebook’s English-language Data Use Policy page where it has detailed the new proposals, there are now over 9,000 comments on the post. The proposal, you can see, has some XXX’s at the top: that’s because it is due to close this evening, at 5pm Pacific Time (yes, more business as usual at Facebook, despite the fact that it also happens to be going through the biggest IPO ever in tech history). Read more...
Mozilla product director says Firefox on Window RT ‘probably not worth it’
A Mozilla product director yesterday said that unless Microsoft allows other browser makers to call important APIs in Windows RT, it is "probably not worth it to even bother" building a version of Firefox for the new operating system.
In a Wednesday post to his personal blog, Asa Dotzler, product director of Firefox, again slammed Microsoft for not allowing third-party browsers access to Win32 APIs, or application programming interfaces, in the upcoming Windows RT.
Windows RT, once called Windows on ARM, or WOA, is the operating system Microsoft is developing for devices -- tablets primarily, but also lightweight laptops -- that rely on processors designed for the ARM architecture. Read more...
VMware puts on new vFabric suite, takes your database on a date
VMware pretty much owns the virtualization layer on X86 iron inside of enterprises, but it has a long way to go to get the same kind of uptake for its vFabric application framework.
Just as it did when it turned the bare-metal ESX Server hypervisor into a server virtualization stack and then a cloudy infrastructure ubertool, the company is transforming the Spring framework it acquired three years ago by rolling all kinds of components into it – to create the vFabric Suite.
The Spring framework is an open-source platform for running Java applications that VMware is beefing up, and it is not to be confused with Cloud Foundry, an open-source platform cloud that mixes up the RabbitMQ messaging service with MySQL, Redis, and MongoDB data services and frameworks for Java and Ruby applications. Read more...
Cisco bundles target BYOD, mobile virtual desktop
Cisco announced yesterday three pre-tested bundles of products and services designed to cut through the confusing complexity of enterprise mobility.
The new Smart Solutions packages are by themselves not new at all: they're formed of existing Cisco hardware and software, third-party partnerships, and consulting services from Cisco or its partners. But Cisco says they represent a shift in the company's thinking about how to deploy mobile technology for businesses.
Instead of a grab bag of separate products, the new approach sees mobility, in effect, as a whole that's greater than the sum of its many parts, including devices, operating systems, apps, Wi-Fi access points, VPNs, authentication, and security. The overarching enterprise benefit, according to Cisco, is summed up in a new term, "Cisco Unified Workspace." Read more...
As Facebook grows, millions say, ‘no, thanks’
Don't try to friend MaLi Arwood on Facebook. You won't find her there.
You won't find Thomas Chin, either. Or Kariann Goldschmitt. Or Jake Edelstein.
More than 900 million people worldwide check their Facebook accounts at least once a month, but millions more are Facebook holdouts.
They say they don't want Facebook. They insist they don't need Facebook. They say they're living life just fine without the long-forgotten acquaintances that the world's largest social network sometimes resurrects. Read more...
Russia’s Twitter rival Futubra unleashes mobile apps
The Russian answer to Twitter, Futubra, just stepped up its game with the release of apps for iOS, Windows Phone and Android.
Using Futubra without being able to read Cyrillic is a bit tricky. On a desktop or laptop browser, you can rely on Google translate in chrome to help you along, on the mobile this won’t work. So, for now, best for those who can read the content to enjoy the mobile apps.
The interface for the apps is still nice and bright, with neon coloured icons show you where to upload images or follow updates. Read more...
Fraunhofer Institute finds security vulnerabilites in cloud storage services
The Fraunhofer Institute for Secure Information Technologoy (SIT) has tested seven cloud storage service providers and published its results in a freely available report
. The authors of the report found vulnerabilities affecting registration and login, encryption and shared access to data for several of the services.
The study looked at CloudMe, CrashPlan, Dropbox, Mozy, TeamDrive, Ubuntu One and Wuala. Each of these services can be accessed directly by means of client software installed on a user's system; the researchers did not look at services such as Amazon's S3 which are only accessible via an API. In response to enquiries by The H's associates at heise Security, a spokesperson confirmed that a follow-up study to look at other major providers is being planned. Read more...
Flashback removal tool arrives for Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard
Apple has announced the release of a standalone Flashback malware removal tool for computers running Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, even though the operating system is no longer officially supported. Like the security updates for 10.6 Snow Leopard and 10.7 Lion, the 1.23MB tool removes "most common variants of the Flashback malware", which reportedly infected more than 600,000 systems, exploiting flaws in earlier versions of Java. Read more...
IP-Address Can’t Even Identify a State, BitTorrent Judge Rules
The mass-BitTorrent lawsuits that are sweeping the United States are in a heap of trouble. After a Florida judge ruled that an IP-address is not a person, a Californian colleague has gone even further in protecting the First Amendment rights of BitTorrent users. The judge in question points out that geolocation tools are far from accurate and that it’s therefore uncertain that his court has jurisdiction over cases involving alleged BitTorrent pirates. As a result, 15 of these mass-BitTorrent lawsuits were dismissed.
In recent years more than a quarter million people have been accused of sharing copyrighted works in the United States.
Copyright holders generally sue dozens, hundreds or sometimes even thousands of people at once, hoping to extract cash settlements from the alleged downloaders. The evidence they present to the court is usually an IP-address and a timestamp marking when the alleged infringement took place. Read more...