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.

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Spray-On Battery Coming To The Office

Researchers at Rice University in Houston have created a prototype spray-on battery that could allow engineers to rethink the way portable electronics are developed.

The rechargeable battery boasts similar electrical characteristics to the lithium ion batteries that power almost every mobile gadget, but it can be applied in layers to almost any surface with a conventional airbrush, said Neelam Singh, a Rice University graduate student who led a team working on the technology for more than a year.

Current lithium ion batteries are almost all variations on the same basic form: an inflexible block with electrodes at one end. Because they cannot easily be shaped, they sometimes restrict designers, particularly when it comes to small gadgets with curved surfaces, but the Rice prototypes could change that.

“Today, we only have a few form factors of batteries, but this battery can be fabricated to fill the space available,” said Singh.

The battery is sprayed on in five layers: two current collectors sandwich a cathode, a polymer separator and an anode.

“It was difficult optimizing the components in the form of a paint,” said Singh. Initial versions were sensitive to moisture and would peel off, but the addition of a polymer and a heat-sealing step solved this problem.

The result is a battery that can be sprayed on to plastics, metal and ceramics.

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Do Work-At-Home People Work Hard?

A new survey by Citrix shows that many people sneak in other activities while working from home.

Based on a survey of 1,013 American office workers, conducted in June by Wakefield Research, 43 percent watch TV or a movie and 20 percent play video games while officially working from home. Parents are more likely than those without children to partake in these two activities, which aren’t work-related.

Nearly a quarter admit that they have a drink or two and another quarter admit to falling asleep. Another 35 percent do household chores; 28 percent cook dinner. Strangely however telecommuters are actually more productive than their peers in the office, according to preliminary findings from Stanford University’s study of a Chinese travel agency.

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Adata Outs 40MB/s UHS microSD Card

Adata has launched a 32GB UHS-1 microSD card offering 40MB/s write bandwidth.

Adata, which recently has been making a big push in the solid-state disk (SSD) drive market, has announced its first microSD cards that support the UHS-1 specification. The firm’s Premier Pro cards come in 8GB, 16GB and 32GB capacities with the firm citing read bandwidth of 45MB/s and all important write bandwidth of 40MB/s.

The SD Card Association defined the UHS-I specification as part of its SD Version 3.01 standard, and while Adata’s new cards boast impressive speeds there is a lot of headroom left, with UHS-1 supporting bandwidths up to 104MB/s. Adata’s cards, roughly translated to the ‘X’ speed rating used on a number of memory cards, come out at 266X.

Ray Chu, product manager at Adata said, “These cards have the best read and write performance among all comparable products offered by the industry’s key players. When that is combined with the aggressive pricing options in store for this line, the result is going to be a bonanza for our customers worldwide.”

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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.

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Corporate America Prefers iPads

Corporate customers who are planning tablet purchases next quarter overwhelmingly picked Apple’s iPad, a research firm said Tuesday.

Of the 1,000 business IT buyers surveyed last month by ChangeWave Research who said they would purchase tablets for their firms in the coming quarter, 84% named the iPad as an intended selection.

That number was more than ten times the nearest competitor and was a record for Apple.

“The percentage reporting they’ll buy Apple iPads has jumped to the highest level of corporate iPad demand ever seen in a ChangeWave survey,” the company said in a blog post.

Apple’s share of future business purchases has never been lower than 77% in any ChangeWave survey, which go back to November 2010.

Just over a fifth of all IT buyers — 22% — confirmed that they would be purchasing tablets for employees in the April-June quarter, ChangeWave said.

While Apple’s stock among corporate buyers rose by seven percentage points from the 77% that tapped the iPad as their preferred device last November, all other tablet makers’ numbers dropped in the most recent survey.
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Nokia To Unveil Cheaper Windows Phone

Nokia debuted a new, cheaper and more budget-friendly smartphone using Microsoft’s Windows Phone software, targeting a wider market for its new range of smartphones.

Cheaper phones are the key for Nokia and Microsoft in their battle to win a larger share of the market, analysts say.

In addition to the new Lumia 610 Nokia will also unveil at the Mobile World Congress trade show in Barcelona a global version of its high-end Lumia 900 phone, which AT&T is scheduled to roll out in the United States, the sources said.

Nokia is set to unveil the phones at a news conference next Monday, on February 27.

Nokia last year dumped its own smartphone software platforms in favor of Microsoft’s Windows Phone, which has so far had a limited impact due to the high prices of phones using it.

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Do You Trust Data-recovery Providers?

Data-recovery service providers are tasked with saving important data for you when something goes wrong — a drive crashes or storage device is dropped, and no backup is available. But do you trust them with the important data you let them recover or could they actually be a source for a data breach?

A survey of 769 IT professionals published this week finds those surveyed need to find out more about the third-party data-recovery services their organizations use. For example, according to the survey, 67% felt that encryption they had in place protected their organizations from data loss or theft during the data recovery process. But encryption keys are often handed over to the third-party data recovery service provider as part of the process, according to the study done by Ponemon Institute.

Ponemon’s “Trends in Security of Data Recovery Operations” report says of the 87% of survey respondents who said their organization had at least one data breach in the past two years, “21% say the breach occurred when a drive was in the possession of a third-party data service provider.”

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Radio Antennas Made Fashionable

Ohio State University researchers armed with sewing machines and computers have designed a way to weave radio antennas into clothing in an effort to give wearers more flexible and reliable communications capabilities.

Utilizing plastic film and metallic thread, the researchers are attempting to outfit American soldiers with better and less intrusive wireless technology, though they say the hands-free design could be applicable to others, including police, firefighters and the elderly.

The researchers outline their antenna design in the journal IEEE Antennas and Wireless Propagation Letters. They acknowledge the concept of wearable antennas isn’t new (combine what they’re doing and some of the invisibility cloak designs that would be woven into clothing and you’d really have something!).

But the OSU researchers claim their design is an improvement over past efforts in that it boosts antenna range fourfold by utilizing a computer controller that fits on a belt and works with multiple antennas that can send and receive signals in all directions. Network coding that coordinates communications among antennas also plays a key role.

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AES Encryption Cracked

CRYPTOGRAPHY RESEARCHERS have identified a weakness in the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) security algorithm that can crack secret keys faster than before.

The crack is the work of a trio of researchers at universities and Microsoft, and involved a lot of cryptanalysis – which is somewhat reassuring – and still does not present much of a real security threat.

Andrey Bogdanov, from K.U.Leuven (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven), Dmitry Khovratovich, who is full time at Microsoft Research, and Christian Rechberger at ENS Paris were the researchers.

Although there have been other attacks on the key based AES security system none have really come close, according to the researchers. But this new attack does and can be used against all versions of AES.

This is not to say that anyone is in immediate danger and, according to Bogdanov, although it is four times easier to carry out it is still something of an involved procedure.

Recovering a key is no five minute job and despite being four times easier than other methods the number of steps required to crack AES-128 is an 8 followed by 37 zeroes.

“To put this into perspective: on a trillion machines, that each could test a billion keys per second, it would take more than two billion years to recover an AES-128 key,” the Leuven University researcher added. “Because of these huge complexities, the attack has no practical implications on the security of user data.” Andrey Bogdanov told The INQUIRER that a “practical” AES crack is still far off but added that the work uncovered more about the standard than was known before.

“Indeed, we are even not close to a practical break of AES at the moment. However, our results do shed some light into the internal structure of AES and indicate where some limits of the AES design are,” he said.

He added that the advance is still significant, and is a notable progression over other work in the area.

“The result is the first theoretical break of the Advanced Encryption Standard – the de facto worldwide encryption standard,” he explained. “Cryptologists have been working hard on this challenge but with only limited progress so far: 7 out of 10 for AES-128 as well as 8 out of 12 for AES-192 and 8 out of 14 rounds for AES-256 were previously attacked. So our attack is the first result on the full AES algorithm.”

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