Reg Office 365 Live Chat: What’s in it for you?
Microsoft Office is the planet’s most ubiquitous productivity suite and Word and Excel still set the standard on personal productivity apps.
The way the software suite is embedded in each office's day-to-day business means that with each new update, Microsoft finds itself struggling to convince people to upgrade. After all, the enterprise in general is known for its tendency to cling to what it's used to.
This time, there’s a new challenge - and it’s not Google Docs: it's the web. Microsoft released Office 2013 with an updated Office 365, a package of webbified Office apps such as Word and Excel combined with Microsoft hosted versions of Exchange, Lync and SharePoint once found in the old Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS). Read more...
Baidu offers English-speaking devs chance to crack China
Chinese search giant Baidu is stepping up efforts to engage with the international developer community with a new English language web site that might just help mobile app devs outside the Great Firewall crack the huge domestic market in the People’s Republic.
The Baidu Cloud Developer Center is for the time being limited to introductory information on Baidu’s developer tools and relevant industry news, but will in time feature all sorts of resources designed to support developers’ efforts to monetise their Android apps. Read more...
Tool released at Black Hat contains 150 ways to bypass Web application firewalls
A tool for testing if Web application firewalls (WAFs) are vulnerable to around 150 protocol-level ev asion techniques was released at the Black Hat USA 2010 security conference on Wednesday.
The tool and the research that went into its creation are the work of Ivan Ristic, director of engineering at security vendor Qualys and the original author of the popular ModSecurity Web application firewall.
Web application firewalls are designed to protect Web applications from known attacks, such as SQL injection attacks, that are commonly used to compromise websites. They do this by intercepting requests sent by clients and enforcing strict rules about their formatting and payload.
However, there are various methods for sneaking malicious requests that violate these rules past WAFs by modifying certain parts of their headers or the paths of requested URLs. These are known as protocol-level evasion techniques, and WAFs are not properly equipped to deal with them at the moment because the techniques are not very well documented, Ristic said. Read more...
Office 2013 shifts security focus from devices to identities
Business users may find the productivity-boosting potential of Office 2013 tantalizing; its ties to the cloud and support for devices beyond PCs means on-the-go users are never far from their important documents. IT admins, on the other hand, may feel more wary than excited by Microsoft's move to untether its ubiquitous productivity suite from the desktop because it represents a significant shift from traditional end-user security.
Microsoft summarizes the nature of the shift pretty well in a security overview of Office 2013: "[This release] makes a fundamental change from computer-centered identity and authentication to user-centered identity and authentication. This shift enables content, resources, most recently used lists, settings, links to communities, and personalization to roam seamlessly with users as they move from desktop, to tablet, to smartphone, or to a shared or public computer." Read more...
Blue Coat software lets companies block, control mobile apps
New software from Web security specialists Blue Coat Systems allows companies to restrict what employees can do on their cellphones while logged into the corporate Wi-Fi.
The software, which works with Blue Coat's ProxySG Web filtering equipment, seeks to fill a gap that exists between company-issued PCs, which are often subject to security and access restrictions, and employee-owned cellphones, on which employees are often free to do what they want.
Companies with high security requirements, such as government departments and banks, see mobile phones as a risk because they could be used to leak documents or send confidential data over insecure channels, said Sasi Murthy, director of Web security at Blue Coat.
"A lot of users are trying to send large datasets over the Internet using Dropbox and Yousendit, but these are not secure," said Murthy. "Now, organizations have the ability to extend application-level control to mobile handsets."
Basic "allow or deny" control is offered for applications such as YouTube, eBay, Gmail and business-networking site LinkedIn. More complex controls exist for apps like Twitter: As well as allow or deny, network mangers can switch on or off the posting of messages, sending email, account login and profile management. Read more...
BlackBerry App World hits 3bn downloads, 27bn more to go
BlackBerry's app store – BlackBerry App World – has notched up 3 billion downloads, parent company RIM boasted in a upbeat developers' blog post.
There are now over 90,000 apps in the store, the post says.
Apple's App Store has seen 30 billion downloads as of June and has about half-a-million apps on its books, but the 3 billion mark is still a bright spot for RIM at a time when its CEO has been forced to deny that the company is "in a death spiral". Read more...
Online dating site dumps Amazon cloud services
Online dating site WhatsYourPrice.com has kissed Amazon Web Services goodbye after severe East Coast thunderstorms knocked out one of Amazon's data centers last weekend causing a services outage.
The service interruption, which began last Friday and continued through Saturday before being fixed, was the second Amazon Web Services outage since mid-June.
WhatsYourPrice.com, where members bid for first dates, said in a statement that the Amazon services outages "produce a lot of unhappy customers." Read more...
Hadoop becomes critical cog in the big data machine
Apache's Hadoop technologies are becoming critical in helping enterprises manage vast amounts of data, with users ranging from NASA to Twitter to Netflix increasing their reliance on the open source distributed computing platform.
Hadoop has gathered momentum as a mechanism for dealing with the concept of big data, in which enterprises seek to derive value from the rapidly growing amounts of data in their computer systems. Recognizing Hadoop's potential, users are both using the existing Hadoop platform technologies and developing their own technologies to complement the Hadoop stack.
Hadoop's corporate usage now and in the futureNASA expects Hadoop to handle large data loads in projects such as its Square Kilometer Array sky-imaging effort, which will churn out 700TBps when built in the next decade. The data systems will include Hadoop, as well as technologies such as Apache OODT (Object Oriented Data Technology), to cope with the massive data loads, says Chris Mattmann, a senior computer scientist at NASA. Read more...
Applicasa expands server-side mobile app dev service to Android
Applicasa, which offers a server-side mobile application development service, is expanding its Web-based technology this week to include the Google Android platform.
The service enables native developers to build cloud-connected back ends for Android and Apple's iOS platform without having to write server code. Server-side mobile applications can use back-end data and leverage cloud-based features such as push notifications, geolocation, and shopping carts. A drag-and-drop interface is offered for database creation and queries, with server-side back ends developed in 10 minutes, Applicasa said. Read more...
Update: Metric firm changes numbers, Chrome still behind Firefox
Web analytics company Net Applications today changed its May numbers from those posted overnight, and now has Google's Chrome still in third place, albeit barely behind Mozilla's Firefox.
Earlier today, the California-based firm had published data that showed Chrome had passed Firefox for the first time, fueled by an increase of 1.3 percentage points to 20.2%. Meanwhile, Net Applications' preliminary numbers had Firefox falling six-tenths of a point to 19.6%.
The spot swapping came as a surprise: Earlier projections by Computerworld had pointed to a delay in Chrome's capture of second place, perhaps to as late as August.
Later Friday, Net Applications revised its numbers. Read more...
6 must-have Pinterest boards for parents
Pinterest — say the word, and heads swivel. Everyone I know is using the site to collect everything from recipes and craft ideas to favorite new products and inspirational quotations. But my friends who are moms, in particular, are beginning to see the beauty of it all — and I don't blame them. As a parent, I've found Pinterest especially helpful in wading through the wonderful and sometimes overwhelming ideas on the Web.
If you're not one of the million people already using Pinterest on a daily basis, here's a look at how to set up your boards for the maximum parental satisfaction. These six board ideas are a great starting point for building the perfect resource to keep your family organized, informed, well-fed, and entertained. Read more...
Chrome to take world’s top browser spot for May
Google's Chrome is about to grab the top browser spot for a full month for the first time from Microsoft's Internet Explorer, data from a Web analytics company showed.
For the month through Monday, Chrome had an average usage share of 32.5%, slightly higher than Internet Explorer's (IE) 32.1%, according to Irish company StatCounter.
If the remaining three days of May play out as did the previous 28, Chrome will take the browser crown from IE for a full month for the first time since Chrome's September 2008 launch.
Previously, Chrome had edged IE on weekends, and then earlier this month topped Microsoft's combined browser usage share for the week ending May 20. That trend continued in the month's fourth week as Chrome beat IE 32.9% to 31.4% for the seven days ending May 27. Read more...
Twilio Calling: Cloud Telephony Startup Adds An Android SDK, Now Works On 75% Of All Smartphones
Cloud-based telephony API startup Twilio has made significant inroads into VoIP and other carrier services like SMS by launching products that work on the web and in iOS apps, supporting 30,000 developers in the process. Today it’s widening that net considerably with the launch of a new Android client, the first SDK from the company to work on Google’s platform. And it hints that Windows Phone may be next in line.
Considering that Android is currently the most popular smartphone platform globally, this potentially gives Twilio a much bigger opportunity to deliver services to the wider smartphone market — with Android and iOS together accounting for 75 percent of the existing smartphone market, according to Gartner. Read more...
MacBook Pro refreshes may be imminent, say reports
Hints that Apple will soon refresh its iMac desktop and MacBook Pro laptop lines accumulated today as several Mac-centric blogs revealed new details gleaned from the Web and unnamed sources.
Analysts who cover Apple agreed, saying that the new notebook models could appear at any time.
"I don't see them waiting for WWDC," said Ezra Gottheil, an analyst with Technology Business Research. "As soon as they have enough supply built up, they'll release them." Read more...