Microsoft India web store ‘hacked by Chinese group’
Microsoft appears to have had its Indian web store broken into and user login credentials stolen by Chinese hackers.
Tech site WP Sauce reported on Sunday that the group, which goes by the name Evil Shadow Team, managed to deface the web site, posting an image of a V for Vendetta mask and the message: “Unsafe system will be baptized.”
At the time of writing the site had been taken offline, presumably while Quasar Media, the third-party digital media firm Microsoft employed to run it, figures out what went wrong. Read more...
The great Dropbox-Twitter-Facebook mashup arrives
Today's Web is brimming with a staggering number of services where users can speak their mind (Twitter), grab vital information (any news or blog source), store important files (Dropbox or Box.net), collaborate with peers (Facebook or Google+), and much more. The dream has long been to devise ways to get these often disparate and siloed services to interact with one another, creating something greater than the sum of its parts.
A new Web application dubbed ifttt.com serves as an excellent yardstick of how far we've come from the early days of specialized, single-purpose mashups, or more complicated SOA where services were cobbled together with complex tools and the coding equivalent of duct tape.
Ifttt.com -- "ifttt" stands for "if this, then that" -- draws on the wealth of APIs for many of today's most popular Web services; it serves as a hub through which users can easily get separate services to work in tandem and carry out incredibly useful, time-saving tasks, called recipes. Read more...
Preparing for the real costs of cloud computing
At a cloud computing conference in New York in June, a number of speakers pointed out that the cloud is moving past the hype stage and is beginning to deliver tangible benefits to organizations. These improvements include increased flexibility and agility.
But moving to the cloud can also mean added costs, some of which might be unexpected, according to IT executives whose organizations have implemented cloud services or are considering them.
While these types of costs don't necessarily prevent companies from getting real business value out of cloud computing initiatives, they will have an impact on the overall cost-benefit analysis of cloud services. Read more...
Microsoft says HealthVault still going strong
Microsoft said it remains committed to HealthVault, its service that lets users store all their medical information in one place, despite Google's announcement last week that it would shut down a similar service because it wasn't popular enough.
"What does this mean for HealthVault? The 'buzz' online ranges wildly, but the real and simple answer is: nothing," Sean Nolan, chief architect for Microsoft's Health Solutions Group, wrote in a blog post Sunday.
He pointed to some advancements to show Microsoft's commitment to the service. It recently made HealthVault accessible from mobile phones and released a software development kit for third parties to develop mobile applications for the service. Read more...
Game rental service will allow T-Mobile customers to try Android apps before buying
If there’s a bummer to this whole mobile app thing, it’s that sometimes picking up a new app is a leap of faith. If something sounds interesting, often you’ll have to purchase it from whatever store in which it’s available to see if it’s any good. If it isn’t, in a lot of cases, you could just be wasting money. If you’re really unlucky, an app will create some sort of software glitch on your device, which is what’s happening with my iPhone right now. Not being able to quit apps has made the last few days tiresome, to say the least. Read more...