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Skype Confirms Glitch
July 23, 2012 by admin
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Skype, a division of Microsoft, confirmed on Monday that a bug in its software has led to instant messages being shared with unintended parties.
The company said it will provide an update to fix the problem in “the next few days.”
According to user reports, the unintended recipients have been connected to just one of the two users who exchanging messages. The problem could have harmful consequences. For example, two co-workers using Skype to exchange IMs (instant messages) could, as a result of the problem, share the message with another contact in one user’s address book — potentially a third co-worker being unfavorably described in their IM exchange.
According to Skype, the problem only arises in “rare circumstances.”
The issue first came to light last week in Skype’s user forums. It seems to stem from the update issued by the voice, video and text messaging service in June.
Micron Profits Go South
While Micron has been negotiating the takeover of Elpida, the firm’s balance sheet isn’t looking particularly healthy, with sales stagnating at $2.1bn while costs increased to $1.9bn. The firm’s net loss for the quarter was $320m, compared to a slim $75m profit in the same period last year.
Micron’s sales might have remained steady, but looking at the firm’s past three quarters paints an increasingly worrying picture for the company. According to the firm, in the nine months up to 31 May 2012 it has lost $789m on sales of $6.2bn.
Most worrying for Micron is how fast the firm’s gross margin – revenue minus the cost of sales – is falling. The firm’s figures show its gross profit has halved to $234m in the last year and the trend is mirrored in the nine month figures.
Micron could point to the harsh conditions in the DRAM market as a reason for its lackluster financials, and while the firm has embraced NAND flash memory producing Crucial branded solid state drives, the margins on those are falling fast.
Windows 7 Most Used OS
Windows 7 is now the leading operating system (OS) for PCs, according to figures from web traffic analysis firm Statcounter.
The report claims that in June more than half of all internet connected PCs, or 50.2 per cent, ran Microsoft’s most recent Windows 7 OS.
Statcounter’s statistics show that Windows XP was the next most popular operating system, used by 29.9 per cent of users.
This might be the first time that Windows 7 has had more market share than the other operating systems put together, but with the launch of Windows 8 looming, it’s only a matter of time before Microsoft will begin pushing Windows 7 users to make the switch to its next operating system.
That’s already started happening with XP. Launched back in 2001, the OS was a massive hit for the software giant and for this reason it’s finding it hard to wean users away from Windows XP – especially considering how rubbish Windows Vista was. However, Microsoft has said that it’s time to move on, and it will end business support for Windows XP in the next two years.
Will More Win8 RT Hybrids Start Showing Up?
June 29, 2012 by admin
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Rumour has it that Nvidia has the best drivers and might be close to fine tuning its Windows RT platform, but we are sure Qualcomm and Texas Instruments aren’t far behind.
The Asus Transformer series has set a new trend by providing tablet users with a keyboard dock with some extra ports and an additional battery. This is definitely the way to go as you get the best of both worlds in a single package Windows 8 RT is finally bringing Microsoft in the ARM market and needless to say there will be many systems to be ready for launch.
Nvidia with Tegra, Texas Instruments with OMAP and Qualcomm with S4 are getting ready to embrace tablets as well as hybrid notebooks based on Windows 8 RT. The Asus Transformer 600 is just the first of many to come and there will be at least a few more similar designs to launch this year with Windows 8 RT, so we have no doubt that we will see quite a few convertible Windows tablets.
Woman Sues LinkedIn
June 25, 2012 by admin
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An Illinois woman has filed a $5 million lawsuit against LinkedIn Corp, claiming that the social network violated promises to consumers by not having better security in place when more than 6 million customer passwords were stolen.
The lawsuit, which was introduced in federal court in San Jose, California, on June 15 and seeks class-action status, was filed less than two weeks after the stolen passwords turned up on websites frequented by computer hackers.
The attack on Mountain View, California-based LinkedIn, an employment and professional networking site with more than 160 million members, was the latest massive corporate data breach to have attracted the attention of class-action lawyers.
A federal judicial panel last week consolidated nine proposed class-action lawsuits in Nevada federal court against online shoe retailer Zappos, a unit of Amazon.com, over its January disclosure that hackers had siphoned information affecting 24 million customers.
The LinkedIn lawsuit was filed by Katie Szpyrka, a user of the website from Illinois. In court papers, her Chicago-based law firm, Edelson McGuire, said LinkedIn had “deceived customers” by having a security policy “in clear contradiction of accepted industry standards for database security.”
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Microsoft Says Windows RT Best For ARM
Microsoft has said its upcoming Windows RT will be loaded on laptops and tablets, claiming it is the “most compatible” ARM operating system.
Microsoft’s Windows 8 will be the first time the firm has launched a desktop operating system that supports the ARM architecture, albeit with the Windows RT branding. Now the firm has said that laptops and tablets will feature Windows RT and called it the most compatible ARM operating system.
Erwin Visser, senior director of Microsoft’s Windows Commercial Business Group said, “Windows RT devices in tablet and laptops will run all the apps from the Windows store. It will also include [Microsoft] Office components like Word, Excel, Powerpoint and Onenote and support a large amount of PC peripherals through in-box class drivers. Relative to other ARM offerings in the market, Windows RT will be the most compatible ARM offering on the market.”
When The INQUIRER asked Visser what he meant by “most compatible” Visser replied, “Taking into acount ARM is a completely new processor architecture and what we’re focused on is a couple of things to help enterprise customers embrace Windows RT. […] All the Windows 8 apps that run on x86 will also run on Windows RT.” Visser also cited inclusion of in-box drivers for PC hardware, something that is largely missing from both Android and IOS devices.
Visser also said users can side-load applications on Windows RT devices, meaning the Windows Store isn’t the only source of applications. When we asked whether this could be a security risk Visser said, “In the case of side-loading apps, the app will be certified through the enterprise IT organisation.”
As for why Microsoft will allow side-loading applications in Windows RT, apparently that is what big business wants. Visser said, “If you think about apps that are used internally, so not apps that are built by enterprises for their consumers or customers but apps that support internal processes, customers do not want to put those apps – because they always have some competitive advantage – in the Windows App Store, which is a public place. So they want to keep those apps within their own infrastructure and [with] side-loading they can still load them on Windows x86 and Windows RT systems.”
AMD Gives Opteron A Boost
AMD has shown there is a little life left in its Bulldozer Opterons by bumping up the clock speed of five Opteron models.
AMD launched its Bulldozer Opteron processors last November amid widespread anticipation that its brand new Bulldozer architecture would once again make it competitive with Intel. Its new architecture failed to impress, but the company has managed to eek out another 100MHz from five Opteron processors in what is likely to be a last hurrah before Piledriver Opterons make their appearance.
AMD bumped up the clocks by 100MHz on the 16-core Opteron 6284 SE and Opteron 6278 to 2.7GHz and 2.4GHz, respectively, while keeping TDPs the same as before, at 140W and 115W, respectively. The firm gave four Opteron 4200 series chips the same 100MHz bump, including the eight-core Opteron 4276HE to 2.6GHz, the six-core Opteron 4240 to 3.4GHz and the Opteron 4230 to 2.9GHz.
AMD was keen to point out that its speed bumped Opteron chips have been picked by Dell and by HP for 11 of its servers. Although the firm has not been able to compete with Intel’s Xeon chips on perfermance, its chips are considerably cheaper, a fact that AMD is using to win customers.
Although AMD’s 100MHz speed bump isn’t going to set the world on fire, every little bit of performance will help the firm as Intel ploughs on with its hugely impressive Sandy Bridge E and Ivy Bridge Xeon chips. AMD’s answer to Intel’s latest Xeon chips is expected to be the Piledriver Opterons.
1 In 5 U.S. PCs Have No Antivirus Protection
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Nearly a fifth of Windows PCs in the U.S. lack any active security protection, an antivirus vendor stated on Wednesday, citing numbers from a year-long project.
“The scale of this is unprecedented,” argued Gary Davis, the director of global consumer product marketing for McAfee, talking about the scope of his company’s sampling of PC security.
McAfee took measurements from scans of more than 280 million PCs over the last 12 months, and found that 19.3% of all U.S. Windows computers browsed the Web sans security software. Owners of those systems downloaded and used McAfee’s free Security Scan Plus, a tool that checks for antivirus programs and enabled firewalls.
Globally, the average rate was 17%, putting the U.S. in the top 5 most-unprotected countries of the 24 represented in the scans.
Of the unprotected PCs in the U.S., 63% had no security software at all, while the remaining 37% had an AV program that was no longer active. The latter were likely trial versions of commercial antivirus software that had expired.
Antivirus trials are a fact of life in the Windows world. Most new machines come with security software that runs for a limited time. Some new Dell PCs, for example, come with a 30-day trial of McAfee’s Security Center program.
Powerful “Flame” Virus Found In Iran
Security experts have uncovered a highly sophisticated computer virus in Iran and other Middle Eastern states that they believe was deployed at least five years ago to engage in state-sponsored cyber espionage.
Evidence suggest that the virus, dubbed Flame, may have been built on behalf of the same nation or nations that commissioned the Stuxnet worm that attacked Iran’s nuclear program in 2010, according to Kaspersky Lab, the Russian cyber security software maker that claimed responsibility for discovering the virus.
Kaspersky researchers said on Monday they have yet to determine whether Flame had a specific mission like Stuxnet, and declined to say who they think built it.
Iran has accused the United States and Israel of deploying Stuxnet.
Cyber security experts said the discovery publicly demonstrates what experts privy to classified information have long known: that nations have been using pieces of malicious computer code as weapons to promote their security interests for several years.
A cyber security agency in Iran said on its English website that Flame bore a “close relation” to Stuxnet, the notorious computer worm that attacked that country’s nuclear program in 2010 and is the first publicly known example of a cyber weapon.
Iran’s National Computer Emergency Response Team also said Flame might be linked to recent cyber attacks that officials in Tehran have said were responsible for massive data losses on some Iranian computer systems.
Is B.Y.O.D Proving To Be A Headache?
May 29, 2012 by admin
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IT managers trying to cope with the growing bring-your-own-device (BYOD) trend can expect to see an explosion in the number of smartphones and tablets used by employees in the next few years.
As a result, IT shops won’t be able to provide the security necessary to protect company data, says Gartner analyst Ken Dulaney.
“The number of devices coming in the next few years will outstrip IT’s ability to keep the enterprise secure,” he said, adding that IT workers are “going crazy” and “get into fights” over whether users should have upgrades.
To help IT cope, software vendors should create what Dulaney called “beneficial viruses” that could be embedded in corporate data carried on mobile devices. These software tools would require users to have licenses in order to access files, just as digital rights management technology does with music and video files.
Beneficial viruses would also “be smart enough” to delete the sensitive data if a device is lost or stolen, or if data winds up on an unauthorized device, Dulaney said, adding, “It’s time for the SAPs and Oracles to begin thinking about doing that, and it’s a lot harder than we think.”
Today, IT shops use mobile device management software to monitor which mobile users are authorized to access applications and whether they can access the data outside the corporate cloud.