Microsoft quietly launches $99/hr. paid support service
Microsoft has quietly launched a support website where experts charge $99 for one- or two-hour sessions designed to rid PCs of malware, speed up a machine or solve problems with Windows or Office.
Answer Desk debuted with no fanfare from Microsoft, which has not deigned to mention the new service in a press release or promote it on the front page of its domain, or even, surprisingly, on its consumer-slanted Windows website.
One of the few places the service does appear is on the Microsoft Store site, where Microsoft sells its own software, the Xbox game system and select OEM's Windows desktops, notebooks, tablets and smartphones.
The new support option is so low-key that Microsoft apparently scrubbed a Dec. 9 blog announcing Answer Desk. The blog, penned by Blake Morrison -- listed on LinkedIn as a Microsoft senior support escalation engineer -- no longer exists on Microsoft's TechNet blog network, although a cached edition was still available Tuesday morning. Read more...
Apple now offering free shipping on all U.S online orders until December 22
Apple has begun its seasonal sales push by offering free shipping on all items purchased via the US portal of the online Apple Store or via its official iOS application, running the promotion until December 22, the company’s website reveals.
The promotion follows Apple’s Thanksgiving deals, which saw the company markdown prices on its Mac, iPad and iPod devices for one day only, the only time in the year that the company introduces widespread discounts on its products and accessories.
AT the time of the writing, deliveries are available free only until December 22 in the US, with Canada and the UK both showing that deliveries are free for today only – a likely nod to an associated Black Monday promotion. Read more...
‘Occupy Flash’ movement wants Adobe’s plug-in dead
A small group of website and mobile app developers have kicked off an "Occupy Flash" campaign to put a stake in the heart of Adobe's popular browser plug-in.
The organization, which launched a website earlier this week, said its goal was to "Get the world to uninstall the Flash Player plug-in from their desktop browsers."
And the group didn't mince words why it was after Flash Player.
"Flash Player is dead. Its time has passed. It's buggy. It crashes a lot. It requires constant security updates," said the Occupy Flash site. "It's a fossil, left over from the era of closed standards and unilateral corporate control of Web technology."
Last week, Adobe announced that it was halting development of Flash Player for mobile browsers, but that it would continue work on the plug-in for desktop browsers such as Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE), Mozilla's Firefox, Google's Chrome and Apple's Safari. Read more...
Anti-software-patent petition makes White House’s top 10
The White House this month began allowing people to create petitions on its website, and an early favorite asks the president to "direct the patent office to cease issuing software patents."
The petition has more than 12,000 signatures, which puts it among the top 10 petitions on the White House website.
The leading petition, at the moment, concerns legalizing marijuana, with more than 41,000 signatures.
The White House has set up a relatively simple process for people to create or sign a petition. It asks for a name and email address, and then verifies the email. Read more...
MySQL.com hacked to serve malware
The website for the open-source MySQL database was hacked and used to serve malware to visitors Monday.
Security vendor Armorize noticed the problem at around 5 a.m. Pacific Time Monday. Hackers had installed JavaScript code that threw a variety of known browser attacks at visitors to the site, so those with out-of-date browsers or unpatched versions of Adobe Flash, Reader, or Java on their Windows PCs could have been quietly infected with malicious software.
By just after 11 a.m., the issue had been cleaned up, said Wayne Huang, Armorize's CEO. He thinks the malicious code was on the site for less than a day. Read more...
Lost iPhone just one headache for Apple security
Wanted: experienced security professional. Must have plan to thwart Chinese counterfeiters, protect secret blueprints from spies and keep workers from leaving super-secret unreleased smartphones behind in bars.
A day after a recent report surfaced that an Apple employee had lost a prototype for a new but unreleased iPhone at a Northern California watering hole, two job listings appeared on Apple's website for managers of "new product security."
Such workers would join a team at the $350 billion company that has included ex-FBI agents and other highly trained pros with backgrounds in intelligence and law enforcement.
While a private security force might not seem in keeping with its user-friendly image, Apple and other companies in its league need the best protection they can buy, corporate security experts say. And lost iPhones likely don't come near the top of the list of anxieties. Read more...
Amazon reworks website before offering new tablet
Amazon.com Inc is rolling out a major redesign of its familiar website as it prepares to offer a new $250 tablet device to rival Apple Inc's iPad.
The changes in Amazon's online store "practically scream 'tablet-optimized'," TechCrunch blogger Sarah Perez wrote over the weekend after her site reported seeing a prototype of the company's new device.
The new web pages show a bigger search bar and less clutter to better highlight music, e-books, digital games and applications from the Amazon Appstore using Google's Android operating system, the blog said.
Amazon started rolling out the new design in the last days of August, spokeswoman Sally Fouts said in an email on Sunday. Read more...
Kotlin project adds another language option to JVM
Just when it seemed like developers already had a plethora of language options on the Java Virtual Machine, JetBrains with Project Kotlin is readying a general-purpose statically typed language for the JVM that is geared to performance-critical applications. Kotlin was revealed last month at the JVM Language Summit in Silicon Valley, and JetBrains is seeking feedback on it, with documentation accessible at the Kotlin website.
InfoWorld Editor at Large Paul Krill recently interviewed Dmitry Jemerov, JetBrains development lead, to discuss Kotlin and why the company is working on it. Although he is not personally involved in design of the language, Jemerov is involved in discussions on the language. Read more...
Mozilla on track to ship Firefox 6 next week
Mozilla is on track to release Firefox 6 next week, according to notes posted on the company's website.
Developers have signed off on Firefox 6 and anticipate no problems that could delay the Aug. 16 release of the browser upgrade, meeting notes show.
"On track with a few bugs still remaining. No concerns for Tuesday," the notes stated.
Mozilla has used a new rapid-release schedule since this spring. The schedule delivers a new version of Firefox every six weeks, a move many have compared to the pace Google has maintained for its Chrome browser for more than a year. Read more...
NuCaptcha improves integration of Captcha system
A company that makes a security product designed to thwart problems such as comment spam has added new security and customization features for website owners.
NuCaptcha's self-titled product takes a different approach to the Captcha, which stands for "Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart."
A Captcha is usually a jumbled sequence of text that a person must enter before they can perform some transaction on a website, such as signing up for a new e-mail account or writing a comment on a blog. Read more...
Saudi Arabia blocks Amnesty International website
Saudi Arabia appears to have blocked the website of human rights organization Amnesty International after it published an analysis that said a proposed anti-terrorist law in the kingdom could be directed against peaceful protests.
Amnesty, which has its international secretariat in London, said in a statement on Monday that its international website had been blocked in Saudi Arabia following the organization's criticism of the draft anti-terror law.
In a message on Twitter, it pointed people to an alternative link to a statement in Arabic on its U.K. site. "Although the Saudi authorities have blocked our main international site, they haven't yet blocked any Amnesty UK site, as far as we know," Amnesty said. Read more...
Hackers claim Apple online data was compromised
A list of 27 user names and encrypted passwords apparently for an Apple website was posted to the Internet over the weekend along with a warning from hacker group Anonymous that the Cupertino-based computer maker could be a target of its attacks.
The list was posted to the Pastebin website, a hosting site for text files, by an unidentified user under the title "Not Yet Serious." It wasn't immediately clear if the user was allied with the Anonymous hacking group, but the existence of the file became widely known after Anonymous linked to it in a Twitter message.
"Not being so serious, but well," the message read before linking to the PasteBin page. "Apple could be target, too. But don't worry, we are busy elsewhere," the message said. Read more...
Apple warned of phishing attack threat for Mac OS X, iOS developers
Apple's website for Mac OS X, iPhone, and iPad developers has a vulnerability that could lead to phishing attacks, according to a hacker group.
The Apple website vulnerability could allow an attacker to specify a link to another site through a "redirect," which could simplify phishing attacks, claims the YGN Ethical Hacker Group. The outfit, dedicated to finding website security flaws, is said to operate from the country of Myanmar.
Unless Apple fixes the alleged vulnerability, the group says it plans to release information publicly in the next few days via the Full Disclosure security mailing list.
This is the practice that the group followed in March when it was frustrated by what it considered a slow response by security firm McAfee about vulnerability issues it found in its website. After public disclosure by the group, McAfee acknowledged the problems. Read more...
Ghostery hunts websites that haunt your privacy
Spend any amount of time online and there is a high chance that some of the websites you visit track information about you. Cookies, scripts and other techniques can be used to monitor how web users behave online and to build up profiles. This may well be information you would prefer not to share, and Ghostery is a browser add-on that can be used to detect, analyze and block any tracking of your online activities. Read more...
Yahoo to release code for selected technologies to open source community
Yahoo plans to release some technologies, including storage technologies, to the open source community, a senior executive of the company said.
These are systems that Yahoo built to help it handle large numbers of users on its websites, but that don't necessarily give it a competitive advantage, said David Chaiken, chief architect at Yahoo, in an interview in Bangalore on Friday.
In 2009, Yahoo donated its Traffic Server scalable caching proxy to the Apache Software Foundation. Read more...