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Total 100 articles, created at 2016-03-25 00:01 1 DOJ Charges Iran Hackers for Hitting New York Dam The Justice Department charged seven individuals with launching DDoS attacks against banks and attempting to disrupt a dam in New York state. 2016-03-24 22:02 5KB (5.02/6) www.eweek.com 2 Choosing Between Apple's 9.7-Inch Tablets: iPad Air 2 vs. iPad Pro
(4.01/6) The new iPad Pro has the same size screen as the already-available iPad Air 2. We highlight key differences and similarities between Apple's two 9.7-inch iPads. 2016-03-24 19:35 1KB www.eweek.com 3 Heroic showdown: 1978 Superman vs. 1989 Batman Christopher Reeve's Superman and Michael Keaton's Batman seek glory in this Honest Trailers competition. You decide which superhero movie is the best -- or possibly the (2.00/6) campiest. 2016-03-24 19:39 1KB cnet.com.feedsportal.com 4 London man reportedly arrested over racist Brussels terrorism tweet The tweet went viral and spawned numerous parodies. Police say the tweeter was (2.00/6) arrested "on suspicion of inciting racial hatred on social media. " 2016-03-24 22:06 1KB cnet.com.feedsportal.com 5 Microsoft Puts AI Chatbot to Sleep After Twitter Taught It to Troll Microsoft's AI chatbot learned to post racist tweets, so it was shut down. 2016-03-24 16:48 (2.00/6) 2KB www.maximumpc.com
6 Vulnerabilities in Apple OS X, iOS exploit protection features
(2.00/6) While the attention of Apple enthusiasts this week is focused on the new iPhone SE and 9.7-in iPad Pro, CISOs are watching 2016-03-24 18:54 4KB www.itworldcanada.com 7 Microsoft's AI bot wants to chat with all you young adults The bot, Tay, has a thing for 18- to 24-year-olds because they're all about getting social on their phones. 2016-03-24 19:47 1KB cnet.com.feedsportal.com (2.00/6)
8 AppDirect buys Xendo to expand intelligent search for cloud apps Xendo's product is similar to Apple's Spotlight Search, except for cloud apps. (2.00/6) 2016-03-24 15:10 2KB zdnet.com.feedsportal.com 9 GDC 2016: Razer Shows Off BlackWidow X Mechanical Gaming Keyboard [VIDEO]
(2.00/6) Razer talks with Maximum PC about its new BlackWidow X mechanical keyboard for gamers. 2016-03-24 15:00 1KB www.maximumpc.com 10 Demo: HP OfficeJet Pro 8740 All-In-One Printer HP says its new OfficeJet 8700 printers offer the speed and efficiency of a LaserJet printer at a fraction of the price. 2016-03-25 00:01 1KB www.crn.com 11 PlayStation exec 'extremely comfortable' with PlayStation VR price Early preorders have exceeded Sony's expectations, executive says. 2016-03-24 19:14 1KB cnet.com.feedsportal.com
12 How to manage IT access for external users Identity and access management (IAM) has extended from being solely an internal IT management process to focus on external business engagement too. 2016-03-24 21:12 1KB www.computerweekly.com 13 Volvo prices S90, rolls out new online purchasing service Volvo Concierge program provides personalized S90 buying experience online. 2016-03-24 22:06 905Bytes cnet.com.feedsportal.com 14 UK podcast 474: Apple's iPhone SE polarises fans and porn comes to life On the UK's best tech podcast this week is the arrival of Apple's new old phone and whether VR porn could lead to some embarrassing moments. 2016-03-24 19:54 1KB cnet.com.feedsportal.com 15 Just Eat appoints new Chief Technology and Product Officer Fernando Fanton will take over from Carlos Morgado who spent seven years as CTO,Leadership ,Just Eat 2016-03-24 20:53 2KB www.computing.co.uk 16 Star Wars Battlefront: These are the issues DICE is tracking The launch of the Star Wars shooter's Outer Rim did not go completely to plan. 2016-03-24 19:43 1KB cnet.com.feedsportal.com 17 Jabba the Hutt marshmallow treats: 'Bring me sugar and the Wookiee!' Bite into a grumpy Star Wars alien with a recipe for making your own sugar-coated Jabba the Hutt marshmallow snacks. 2016-03-24 19:03 1KB cnet.com.feedsportal.com 18 DevOps is a game changer for us, says Greater London Authority CIO David Munn says integration of teams and a change of job profiles has been 'incredibly powerful' for GLA,DevOps,Leadership ,DevOps,Leadership 2016-03-24 18:49 3KB www.computing.co.uk 19 Cutting IT costs in your SMB Saving money in the office isn’t just about turning the heating down or reusing the same teabag over and over...,Software,Hardware,Leadership ,HPE,HP,Intel,SMB Spotlight,smb- networking,smb-server,smb-services,smb-storage 2016-03-24 18:49 1KB www.computing.co.uk 20 Global property firm RLB ditched hardware to go all-cloud Head of IT Mark Evans reveals how the organisation's shift to cloud has unleashed RLB's entrepreneurialism,Cloud and Infrastructure ,Cloud,Cloud and Infrastructure 2016-03-24 18:49 3KB www.computing.co.uk 21 Oracle delivers fully-managed version of Oracle Cloud to deploy on customer premises Oracle can extend its public cloud into customer data centres to address data residency issues,Cloud and Infrastructure ,Oracle,iaas,PaaS,SaaS 2016-03-24 18:48 5KB www.computing.co.uk 22 Rising tide: How Northumbrian Water's CIO James Robbins is preparing for market competition The water industry is about to be submerged in competition. Robbins tells Computing how the company is preparing,Leadership ,CIO Interview,CIO,Northumbrian Water 2016-03-24 18:49 902Bytes www.computing.co.uk
23 Pornhub wants you to watch VR for free The adult entertainment biz is promoting virtual reality, just like it once backed VHS tapes and Blu-ray discs. 2016-03-24 18:58 2KB cnet.com.feedsportal.com 24 Apple designing its own iCloud servers to avoid surveillance The NSA is known to intercept tech in-transit through the postal system. 2016-03-24 19:32 2KB zdnet.com.feedsportal.com 25 Thanks, Twitter. You turned Microsoft's AI teen into a horny racist Technically Incorrect: Microsoft's Tay seemed so innocent. Until she started talking to and learning from real-life humans. 2016-03-24 22:06 2KB cnet.com.feedsportal.com 26 Gears of War 4 story sets up new trilogy, devs discuss new direction for franchise Rod Fergusson: "I have no aspirations to be like this is the greatest story ever told. " 2016-03-24 20:57 2KB cnet.com.feedsportal.com 27 Man charged over proxy server to torrent sites circumventing ISP blocks Callum Haywood charged with fraud and 'conversion of criminal property',Internet ,Piracy 2016-03-24 18:45 2KB www.computing.co.uk 28 Over 90 percent of CISOs expect to be hit by cyber attack in 2016 Yet three quarters of CISOs admit their security isn't up to scratch to deal with threat,Cloud and Infrastructure,Security ,Cloud,Cloud and Infrastructure,security,CISO,CEB 2016-03-24 18:45 3KB www.computing.co.uk 29 Street Fighter 5 March update release date confirmed, DLC characters free until real money shop added Zenny shop "is not ready to launch just yet, there is currently no ETA. " 2016-03-24 20:57 2KB cnet.com.feedsportal.com 30 Dark Souls 3 is 900p on Xbox One, looks 'impressive,' report says Technical analysis of the new RPG also reveals frame rate can drop to 20fps in some sections. 2016-03-24 20:57 1KB cnet.com.feedsportal.com 31 Adding virtual reality to a roller coaster: Good idea, or nauseating? (The 3:59, Ep. 16) Today, Roger and Ben focus on virtual reality, thrill rides and, uh, porn. Yes, porn. 2016-03-24 19:47 1KB cnet.com.feedsportal.com 32 UK looks at impact of AI and robotics on jobs and society Submissions invited on the impact on jobs and the workplace, as well as social, ethical and legal issues which could arise from the rise of AI. 2016-03-24 18:04 2KB zdnet.com.feedsportal.com 33 Samsung Pay: What you need to know (FAQ) Samsung Pay is now available in the US. Here's how it works and what you need to use the mobile payment system. 2016-03-24 17:02 5KB cnet.com.feedsportal.com 34 Shock. Blondes are actually the smartest, research claims Technically Incorrect: For some reason or other, researchers at Ohio State decided to confront one of the world's dullest cliches. And look what they discovered. 2016-03-24 17:03 2KB cnet.com.feedsportal.com 35 10 bonkers bunnies to haunt your Easter holiday Rabbits aren't all just fluffy cute little things. Sometimes they eat medieval knights, glow under blacklight or grow a Benedict Cumberbatch face. 2016-03-24 17:01 854Bytes cnet.com.feedsportal.com 36 My favorite roller coaster now blasts off as a VR ride! Commentary: CNET's Katie Collins tests a theme park ride in its new guise as the world's first coaster with built-in VR. 2016-03-24 16:46 5KB cnet.com.feedsportal.com 37 YouTube may run with its own live-video app Apparently dubbed YouTube Connect, the app would let you broadcast and watch live video streams from your smartphone or tablet, according to a VentureBeat source. 2016-03-24 19:47 1KB cnet.com.feedsportal.com 38 'Lego Batman Movie' teaser trailer takes us inside the brick Batcave Teaser proves the plastic-brick superhero film, due in 2017, won't be as serious as its live-action predecessors. 2016-03-24 19:47 1KB cnet.com.feedsportal.com 39 Augmentez l’engagement de vos clients Les attentes du client, telles que la rapidité de réponse et l'efficacité, ont augmenté de manière inversement proportionnelle au nombre de canaux 2016-03-24 19:38 788Bytes www.itworldcanada.com 40 Google Cloud Platform touts investments in security, data centers, and containers At the 2016 Google Cloud Platform Next conference, Google leaders walked through the company's core investments in its Cloud Platform. 2016-03-24 17:38 4KB zdnet.com.feedsportal.com 41 Weak links in the blockchain: We're neglecting the foundations Premature infatuation with blockchain overlooks security weaknesses in the platform that underlies Bitcoin digital currency. 2016-03-24 17:33 1KB zdnet.com.feedsportal.com 42 Cloud plus artificial intelligence is creating The Matrix (and that's a good thing) "Extraordinary" merger of machine intelligence and cloud economics, is changing business operations and society, says Leading Edge Forum. 2016-03-24 17:10 3KB zdnet.com.feedsportal.com 43 How to make Facebook private: Secure your Facebook profile to keep prying eyes at bay Facebook is the biggest and best-known social network, but that doesn’t mean its users don’t need to keep their wits about them. Here’s how to secure your Facebook account and protect your privacy on Facebook. 2016-03-24 17:04 9KB www.pcadvisor.co.uk 44 Starbucks finally launching an app for Windows phones, banks are coming back too Starbucks has been one of those apps missing from Windows phones that always bothered me. We hear that Starbucks is coming soon to mobile while banks make a return through the universal Windows 10 platform. 2016-03-24 16:49 2KB zdnet.com.feedsportal.com
45 This is how you'll play Pokemon Go New details emerge 2016-03-24 16:21 2KB feedproxy.google.com 46 Watch Machete slay these delicious tacos -- in 360 degrees Three-minute clip on YouTube lets you watch Danny Trejo enjoy some delicious tacos in all their 360-degree glory. Mesmerizing. 2016-03-24 18:35 898Bytes cnet.com.feedsportal.com 47 How IoT, Cloud Create Actionable Insights for Microsoft Customers We look at six Microsoft customers and how connecting assets they already had with IoT and the cloud unlock new actionable insights from their data. 2016-03-24 18:05 1KB www.eweek.com 48 Prompted by media reports of acquisition talks, Apple officials confirmed there had been discussions, but that there are no plans to buy Imagination. Prompted by media reports of acquisition talks, Apple officials confirmed there had been discussions, but that there are no plans to buy Imagination. 2016-03-24 18:05 3KB www.eweek.com 49 Computerworld UK Daily Digest - 24 March 2016 - Useful online devops training courses - Google’s Eric Schmidt on machine learning - What is the future for a CIO? Welcome to today's Computerworld UK Daily Digest. We explore online devops training courses, Google's Eric Schmidt on machine learning and ponder the future of the CIO. Plus: Google Campus London launches Future Founders programme for young entrepreneurs. 2016-03-24 16:00 996Bytes www.computerworlduk.com 50 How to turn iOS into Android: Give your iPhone an Android makeover using Andrios iOS and Android are two completely different operating systems that look and perform completely differently. With that being said, we’ve found a way for iPhone users to turn iOS into Android complete with lock screen widgets, a redesigned notification center and of course, the Android back button. 2016-03-24 15:55 4KB www.pcadvisor.co.uk 51 LG Watch Urbane 2nd Edition LTE launching on AT&T and Verizon This may appear to be the same headline used last November, but after pulling this watch from the store shelves LG is ready to launch it again. 2016-03-24 15:54 2KB zdnet.com.feedsportal.com 52 13 best budget displays 2016 UK: What's the best budget PC monitor you can buy in the UK? Finding a budget PC monitor which fits your needs can be tricky. Here, we look at the best budget monitors you can currently buy in 2016. 2016-03-24 15:39 11KB www.pcadvisor.co.uk 53 Best security cameras for home use 2016: monitor your home from your phone, record video and get motion alerts with these connected cameras The latest internet connected cameras let you keep a watchful eye on your home, pets, kids, cars and more during the day and at night. We test the best security cameras for home use in 2016. Plus: How to turn an old phone into a security camera 2016-03-24 15:37 15KB www.pcadvisor.co.uk 54 850 million Android devices still at risk of hijack by Stagefright bug Security researchers say fragmented manner of Android operating system restricts protections against bug. 2016-03-24 15:31 3KB zdnet.com.feedsportal.com
55 Uber accused of changing scope of bug bounties to avoid payouts Taxi for Uber 2016-03-24 15:30 3KB www.theinquirer.net 56 How Uncharted, Killzone and Crash Bandicoot could be great on phones Sony is going mobile, so why not make use of its heroes? 2016-03-24 15:14 4KB feedproxy.google.com 57 Brazil sees new low in tablet sales Performance in 2015 was the worst of the last five years, says IDC 2016-03-24 15:12 2KB zdnet.com.feedsportal.com 58 How to take better photos on your iPhone: tips, tricks, apps and accessories for improving your iPhone photos and videos If you want to take better photos using your iPhone, we've got some great tips on how to do it. You don't have to spend any money, but if you can, there are apps and accessories which will take your photos - and videos - to the next level. 2016-03-24 15:10 6KB www.pcadvisor.co.uk 59 Guiding Eyes moves to IBM Cloud to continue mission of serving the blind Nonprofit wants better access and analysis of its structured and unstructured canine data to boost guide dog graduation rates 2016-03-24 15:04 2KB sdtimes.com 60 Microsoft is about to change Skype radically Skype on Windows 10 devices will be very different with the UWP app 2016-03-24 15:00 2KB feedproxy.google.com 61 Microsoft to reunify Skype calling, messaging, video in new Universal Windows 10 app Microsoft is readying a new Universal Windows Platform version of its Skype app for Windows 10 for PCs and phones that will bring together Skype's calling, messaging and video features. 2016-03-24 15:00 3KB zdnet.com.feedsportal.com 62 Best tech deals of Easter deals week: Cheap TVs, tablets, headphones, speakers & more tech Amazon is kicking off a huge Easter Deals Week and Lightning Deals have begun early. Here are the best Amazon tech deals. 2016-03-24 15:00 3KB www.pcadvisor.co.uk 63 5 New Features In Intel's New NUC That Will Blow System Builders Away Intel took the wraps off its newest version of NUC, a "Next Unit of Computing" mini PC kit. Here's the wow factor for system builder partners. 2016-03-24 14:55 1KB www.crn.com 64 Hackers hit utility and water systems They could poison people 2016-03-24 14:54 2KB www.theinquirer.net
65 Google Updates: hands up, pay up, building down Your weekly guide to the inner workings of the Googletron 2016-03-24 14:43 2KB www.theinquirer.net 66 Aorus X5S v5 review One wicked 4K gaming laptop, so long an outlet is nearby 2016-03-24 14:40 4KB feedproxy.google.com
67 LifeBEAM nabs $16 million to expand AI-based wearable fitness tech LifeBEAM was founded by former Israeli air force pilots looking for new ways to monitor human physiology. 2016-03-24 14:39 2KB zdnet.com.feedsportal.com 68 Google starts naming and shaming with certificate transparency report Is your certificate in or out? 2016-03-24 14:32 2KB www.theinquirer.net 69 The 'Big Boys' Came To Play: HPE, Cisco Shake Up Hyper- Converged Landscape Solution providers try to make sense of what big vendors jumping into the hyper- converged market means for the overall business landscape. 2016-03-24 14:22 2KB www.crn.com 70 AT&T Adds IoT Platform To Help Partners Realize Growing Mobility Opportunities AT&T wants to help its channel partners realize the opportunity around mobility. The carrier introduced an IoT platform – Control Center – for its Partner Exchange members, and released a mobility guide for partners. 2016-03-24 14:19 3KB www.crn.com 71 The ultimate tech logos quiz Can you guess all the tech logos? 2016-03-24 14:10 695Bytes feedproxy.google.com 72 Now Microsoft Office 2016 can block macro malware attacks Microsoft has a new tactical feature in Office 2016 that should go some way to protecting the enterprise from macro-based malware. 2016-03-24 14:06 3KB zdnet.com.feedsportal.com 73 Vevo's app update taps Spotify for music video recommendations, and more Machine learning strikes again 2016-03-24 14:00 3KB feedproxy.google.com 74 2016 Channel Madness Tournament Of Chiefs: Round 2 Matchup Breakdowns Voting for Round 2 of the 2016 Channel Madness Tournament Of Chiefs is now open. Click here to get some insight into the Solutions 16 matchups. 2016-03-24 13:38 1KB www.crn.com 75 Does Apple think it's 'sad' that there are so many old iPads out there too? Apple exec Philip Schiller thinks that it's 'sad' that there are 600 million old PCs out there. Well, what does he think of all those old iPads that are out there? 2016-03-24 13:22 2KB zdnet.com.feedsportal.com 76 Citrix rolls out Secure Browser to lock down delivery of browser-based apps The software vendor says Secure Browser allows IT departments to ensure applications can be delivered to employee devices with zero endpoint configuration or plugins. 2016-03-24 13:08 2KB zdnet.com.feedsportal.com 77 Microsoft and Samsung go deeper into the Internet of Things Samsung said in its developer conference session agenda it plans to reveal a new IoT RTOS 2016-03-24 13:04 2KB sdtimes.com
78 Intel Quietly Speeds Up Skylake-U: i7-6660U now in Price List Intel has quietly added a new Skylake-U processor into its price list. The new Intel Core i7-6660U system-on-chip is designed... 2016-03-24 13:00 2KB www.anandtech.com 79 Overclockers 8Pack Asteroid review An incredible gaming PC with stonking design – and a daunting price 2016-03-24 13:00 3KB feedproxy.google.com 80 How to optimise and organise iTunes Check your library 2016-03-24 12:49 4KB feedproxy.google.com 81 Google announces intelligent cloud products, Java vulnerability affects Oracle products, and GNOME 3.20 Delhi released— news digest: March 24, 2016 Google announces new products and services for machine learning; Oracle patches Java vulnerability; GNOME 3.20 is released with new features and bug fixes 2016-03-24 12:39 3KB sdtimes.com 82 Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Yoga is an outstanding 2-in-1 from any angle The ThinkPad X1 Yoga is a thin, light laptop that can also be used as a tablet. 2016-03-24 12:30 4KB zdnet.com.feedsportal.com 83 Review: Get onto 4G on a budget with Innos M34T aka SsabaSimu Nowadays smartphones come in all shapes, colors and sizes. You can find one for just about any price you’re willing to pay. As such we’ve come to wonder if some internet- enabled phones should really be called smartphones at all, what with all the trouble getting... 2016-03-24 12:18 4KB pctechmag.com 84 Salesforce rolls out Desk 360 to combine sales and service tools for SMBs The product works to give SMB support teams more context surrounding customer issues, helping them respond with the right information to improve the customer service experience and close sales. 2016-03-24 12:00 2KB zdnet.com.feedsportal.com 85 Hands on: 4K TCL Roku TV review A super sharp, super smart TV coming to a home theater near you 2016-03-24 12:00 7KB feedproxy.google.com 86 Q&A: Tech Data CEO Talks Ingram-HNA Deal, Blossoming Apple Partnership and Dell-EMC Synergies Bob Dutkowsky dishes on the premium Tianjin Tianhai paid for Ingram Micro, how Apple penetrated the enterprise to become Tech Data's largest partner, and why he believes Dell and EMC have become so channel-centric. 2016-03-24 11:44 1KB www.crn.com 87 How Kinect is helping people to breathe Take a deep breath... 2016-03-24 11:41 2KB feedproxy.google.com 88 Chinese citizen pleads guilty to hacking US defense contractor systems The Chinese national faces up to five years behind bars for breaking stealing data belonging to Boeing and other contractors. 2016-03-24 11:31 3KB zdnet.com.feedsportal.com 89 Energy Star 3.0 server spec to look at coprocessors for more accurate power-efficiency ratings The U. S. Environmental Protection Agency is revising the Energy Star specification for servers to take into account significant system design changes and help buyers make effective purchasing decisions. 2016-03-24 11:28 3KB www.computerworld.com 90 Mesosphere raises $73.5 million in series C funding Strategic Investment Round Led by Hewlett Packard Enterprise Backs DCOS as More and More Enterprises Shift to Container, Microservices and Distributed Computing Architectures 2016-03-24 11:25 4KB sdtimes.com 91 Preorder iPhone SE: New iPhone SE UK release date, price, full specifications, performance benchmarks - 4in iPhone is more iPhone 6s than iPhone 5s with top performance and camera Apple has confirmed its new 4in iPhone as the iPhone SE, which you can preorder tomorrow. Here's everything you need to know about the iPhone SE UK release date, price, where to buy and specifications. Plus: Apple's iPhone SE launch as it happened. 2016-03-24 11:21 11KB www.pcadvisor.co.uk 92 Save 73% on Samsung's Wireless Charging Pad - Deal Alert With this accessory, you can charge your compatible Galaxy smartphones, and other Qi- compatible devices, without the need to plug your device in to a wall charger or USB port. 2016-03-24 11:15 1KB www.itnews.com 93 Review: Amazon puts machine learning in reach Amazon Machine Learning gives data science newbies easy-to-use solutions for the most common problems. 2016-03-24 11:05 1KB www.computerworld.com 94 YouTube Connect could knock Periscope off its throne Periscope and Facebook Live need to watch out 2016-03-24 11:04 1KB feedproxy.google.com 95 Rockstar came close to making Grand Theft Auto: Tokyo And work on 6 has begun 2016-03-24 10:59 2KB feedproxy.google.com 96 Google+ 7.5 update gets transparent about failed posts and squashes a colony of bugs It may not be the world's most popular social network, but Google is at least trying to craft a better mobile experience. 2016-03-24 10:49 1KB www.itnews.com 97 45% off Mini DisplayPort 1.2 to HDMI/DVI/VGA Adaptor - Deal Alert This adaptor is 45% off and will connect Mini DisplayPort / Thunderbolt enabled devices to HDMI, DVI or displays. 2016-03-24 10:39 1KB www.itnews.com 98 How to move photos from Flickr (unless you want to pay for storage): Upload your images to Google Photos for free With Flickr now charging for uploading batches of images, you're probably thinking of switching to a service like Google Photos, Smugmug or 500PX. In this feature we'll show you how to move your photos from Flickr to a new home. 2016-03-24 10:30 7KB www.pcadvisor.co.uk 99 Docker goes native for Windows and Mac Docker for Windows and Docker for Mac incorporate OS virtualization, thus establishing a bridge to true native containers on the platforms 2016-03-24 10:21 2KB www.infoworld.com
100 Report: Google builds an Amazon Echo alternative while Nest turns to security What are Alphabet's smart home plans? Depends on whether you’re talking about Nest or Google. 2016-03-24 10:13 2KB www.itnews.com Articles
Total 100 articles, created at 2016-03-25 00:01
1 DOJ Charges Iran Hackers for Hitting New York Dam (5.02/6) The Justice Department charged seven individuals with launching DDoS attacks against banks and attempting to disrupt a dam in New York state. The U. S. government is taking direct legal aim at seven Iranian individuals for attacking American banks and infrastructure. The Department of Justice today announced that an indictment was issued by a grand jury in the Southern District of New York for attacks that include a 176-day distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) campaign against the U. S. financial sector, as well as an attack against the Bowman Dam in New York state. "For many years, nation states and their affiliates enjoyed what they perceived to be a cloak of anonymity. A cloak they hid behind to break our laws through cyber intrusions and to threaten our security and economic well-being," Assistant Attorney General John P. Carlin said at a press conference announcing the charges. "They had this perceived cloak because they thought we couldn't figure out who did it and, if we did figure it out, we would keep it a secret. They are wrong. " The seven individuals charged by the DOJ were employed by the Iran-based ITSecTeam (ITSEC) and Mersad Company (MERSAD), both of which have direct ties to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and the Iranian government. Charges against the seven individuals include conspiracy to commit and to aid and abet computer hacking. The seven individuals named by the DOJ indictment are Ahmad Fathi, 37; Hamid Firoozi, 34; Amin Shokohi, 25; Sadegh Ahmadzadegan (a.k.a. Nitr0jen26), 23; Omid Ghaffarinia (a.k.a. PLuS), 25; Sina Keissar, 25; and Nader Saedi (a.k.a. Turk Server), 26. Firoozi is the only one of the seven who is being directly charged in relation to the attack on the Bowman Dam, which occurred between Aug. 28 and Sept. 18, 2013. According to the indictment, Firoozi was able to repeatedly obtain unauthorized access to the Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems of the Bowman Dam in Rye, N. Y. With the access, the DOJ alleges that Firoozi was able to get status updates on the operation of the dam, including water levels and temperature. The access also gave Firoozi insight into the status of the dam's sluice gate, which controls the water level. "Although that access would normally have permitted Firoozi to remotely operate and manipulate the Bowman Dam's sluice gate, Firoozi did not have that capability because the sluice gate had been manually disconnected for maintenance at the time of the intrusion," the DOJ stated. The DDoS campaign against U. S. financial institutions ran from December 2011 until September 2012. The attack hit a peak of 140G bps of data at its height, impacting the operations of multiple organizations, restricting access by customers to bank accounts. The actual DDoS attack was conducted by first building out a pair of botnets, comprised of an unspecified number of compromised systems. While the DDoS attacks did impact the operations of the attacked U. S. financial institutions, there was no data breach. "Although the DDoS campaign caused damage to the financial sector victims and interfered with their customers' ability to do online banking, the attacks did not affect or result in the theft of customer account data," the DOJ stated. This is not the first time that the DOJ has charged foreign nationals with attacking American organizations. In May 2014, the DOJ filed an indictment against Chinese Army officials alleging the theft of intellectual property from U. S. firms. "Today's announcement proves, once again, there is no free pass for nation state affiliated computer intrusions," Assistant Attorney General John P. Carlin said. "No matter where a hacker is located or who he is affiliated with—China or North Korea, ISIL or SEA [Syrian Electronic Army]—we can figure who did it, by name and face, we can do so publicly and we can impose consequences. " However, the DOJ has never managed to apprehend the Chinese attackers, and the same will likely be true in the new case against the Iranian hackers. To date, U. S. law enforcement has not brought the seven charged Iranian individuals into custody. Casey Ellis, CEO and founder of security vendor Bugcrowd, noted that given the increasing frequency of nation-to-nation attacks and the rising level of public awareness and concern about this type of vulnerability and threat, the DOJ should take a firm stand against these hackers, but more needs to be done to protect infrastructure from attack. "Adversaries cannot attack what is not vulnerable, and it's widely known now that this type of infrastructure needs serious work when it comes to making it more resilient against attacks," Ellis told eWEEK. Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at eWEEK and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.
Iranians indicted in hacks on US banks, New York dam cnet.com.feedsportal.com Iranians charged with cyberattacks on US banks, New York dam zdnet.com.feedsportal.com
7 Iranians accused of hacking U.S. banks, New York dam computerworld.com US accuses 7 Iranians of hacking US banks, New York dam itnews.com 2016-03-24 22:02 Sean Michael www.eweek.com
2 Choosing Between Apple's 9.7-Inch Tablets: iPad Air 2 vs. iPad Pro (4.01/6) Apple's "Let us loop you in" event on March 21 was a predictable affair. The company announced the iPhone SE that had been rumored for months, showed off some colorful new wristbands for the Apple Watch and talked about renewable energy. However, the event also made it harder for customers to decide which iPad to buy when Apple unveiled the new 9.7-inch iPad Pro. Designed to complement the big-screen 12.9-inch iPad Pro, the tablet enables users to connect to the company's Smart Keyboard. The smaller iPad Pro also features support for Apple Pencil and runs on Apple's latest A9X processor. But at 9.7- inches, its screen size is identical to the already available iPad Air 2. And for customers who don't want the diminutive iPad Mini or the gigantic 12.9-inch iPad Pro, it may not be easy to choose which device to buy. This slide show highlights some of the major differences and similarities between Apple's two 9.7-inch iPads and aims to help buyers decide which model best suits their needs.
Apple offers Office 365 as option with new iPad Pro cnet.com.feedsportal.com Apple boosts iPad Pro's 'PC replacement' credentials with Office 365 add-on feedproxy.google.com
The 9.7-inch iPad Pro is now available for preorders itnews.com 2016-03-24 19:35 Don Reisinger www.eweek.com
3 Heroic showdown: 1978 Superman vs. 1989 Batman (2.00/6) Retro superhero films didn't dwell entirely on violence and vengeance. In fact, in the '70s and '80s, most superheroes saved the world with smiles on their faces, or at least joked once or twice while punching out the bad guys. Honest Trailers pulls scenes from the movies and adds voice-over commentary, sometimes witty, sometimes insightful, sometimes both. Watch the Honest Trailers for the two films and judge for yourself which one deserves to win as the best trailer tribute. The trailer with the most views wins. If the Caped Crusader gets more views, Honest Trailers will make a video for the movie "Batman Begins. " If the Man of Steel wins, it will make a video for "Superman Returns. " This is not an easy decision to make considering both videos from Honest Trailers call out many of the movies' foibles. Good luck deciding which superhero trailer is the most honest. To be fair, we voted for both. "Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice" opened in Australia on Thursday and in the US and UK on Friday.
Batman V Superman: Dawn Of Justice review feedproxy.google.com 2016-03-24 19:39 Bonnie Burton cnet.com.feedsportal.com
4 London man reportedly arrested over racist Brussels terrorism tweet (2.00/6) Here's a master class in how not to respond to a terrorist incident. The tweet, which went viral, read: "I confronted a Muslim woman yesterday in Croydon. I asked her to explain Brussels. She said 'Nothing to do with me'. A mealy mouthed reply. " A Metropolitan Police spokesman said: "A 46- year-old man was arrested at his home address in Croydon on Wednesday, 23 March on suspicion of inciting racial hatred on social media. He was taken to a south London police station. " The arrested man's tweet quickly went viral, spawning dozens of parodies that riffed on subjects as diverse as Donald Trump and brussels sprouts.
Microsoft deletes AI chatbot after racist, homophobic tweets, according to report sdtimes.com 2016-03-24 22:06 Katie Collins cnet.com.feedsportal.com
5 Microsoft Puts AI Chatbot to Sleep After Twitter Taught It to Troll (2.00/6) Microsoft had good intentions when it unleashed " Tay ," an AI chatbot designed to interact with the millennial crowd, to the Twitterverse. At the same time, Microsoft displayed an incredible amount of naivety in not predicting or preparing for what would happen next. In short order, Twitter users corrupted Microsoft's sweet, innocent chatbot,. They discovered she would repeat tweets, no matter how offensive, and before long Tay had devolved into a racist chatbot tweeting inflammatory remarks, conspiracy theories, and all matter of offensive content. Her tweets involved Hitler, Jews, 9/11, and so forth. Again, this isn't what Microsoft intended. Microsoft's technology and research and Bing teams collaborated to create a chatbot that would "experiment with and conduct research on conversational understanding. " It was also designed to "entertain people," but with "casual and playful conversation," not Internet trolling. Microsoft has deleted the offensive tweets (you can still view many of them on Social Hax ) and pulled Tay offline for the time being. "The AI chatbot Tay is a machine learning project, designed for human engagement. It is as much a social and cultural experiment, as it is technical. Unfortunately, within the first 24 hours of coming online, we became aware of a coordinated effort by some users to abuse Tay's commenting skills to have Tay respond in inappropriate ways. As a result, we have taken Tay offline and are making adjustments," Microsoft said in a statement. We assume the next version of Tay that emerges won't be so prone to repeating everything she sees on Twitter, particularly things like "Hitler was right. " But the real question here is how did Microsoft not foresee this happening? It's like a parent dropping off his impressionable teenage daughter at a college frat party and expecting nothing but moral behavior while she's there. Good luck with that. Follow Paul on Google+ , Twitter , and Facebook
Microsoft's Tay AI chatbot goes offline after being taught to be a racist zdnet.com.feedsportal.com 2016-03-24 16:48 Paul Lilly www.maximumpc.com
6 Vulnerabilities in Apple OS X, iOS exploit protection features (2.00/6) While the attention of Apple enthusiasts this week is focused on the new iPhone SE and 9.7-in iPad Pro , CISOs are watching several vulnerabilities in the company’s platforms that have just been found. This morning SentinelOne researchers revealed a major flaw in all versions of OS Xwhich allows for local privilege escalation and bypass of System Integrity Protection, Apple’s newest protection feature. It was reported to Apple and patches will be available soon, SentinelOne said. “This vulnerability not only reveals a major security flaw in OS X, but also provides further evidence that exploits can be extremely stealthy, and at times, virtually impossible to detect,” the vendor said in a statement. “The nature of this particular exploit enables it to evade defenses by utilizing very reliable and stable techniques that traditional detection mechanisms, looking for more obvious warning signs, would miss.” In an email researcher Pedro Vilaça, who discovered the problem, said it wasn’t easy to spot. “You need to think about the whole process and know how it works. After you discover it, it appears to be easy to find. However, hindsight is always 20/20.” He described it as a non-memory corruption bug that allows users to execute arbitrary code on any binary. It can bypass a key security feature of the latest version of OS X, El Capitan, the System Integrity Protection (SIP) without kernel exploits. SIP is a new feature, which is designed to prevent potentially malicious software from modifying protected files and folders: essentially to protect the system from anyone who has root access, authorized or not. The same exploit allows someone to escalate privileges and also to bypass system integrity. In this way, the same OS X security feature designed to protect users from malware can be used to achieve malware persistency. To exploit this vulnerability, an attacker must first compromise the target system in any way — for example by a spearphishing attack or by exploiting the user’s browser. On Monday Apple updated OS X El Capitan as well as patched a number of security vulnerabilities. Meanwhile last week Palo Alto Networks said it found a new family of iOS malware that successfully infected non-jailbroken devices through Apple’s FairPlay digital rights management protection mechanism to spread malware. Dubbed “AceDeceiver,” the man-in-the-middle attack installs itself without compromising an enterprise certificate by exploiting design flaws in FairPlay. After being alerted Apple removed several apps that leverage AceDeceiver from App Store in February that purported to be wallpaper, the Palo Alto said –noting the apps would have had to pass Apple’s code review several times. But, researchers say the malware may still spread thanks to a novel attack vector. iOS devices request an authorization code for each app downloaded from the App Store to prove it was actually purchased. In the FairPlay MITM attack, attackers purchase an app from App Store then intercept and save the authorization code. They then developed PC software that simulates the iTunes client behaviors, and tricks iOS devices to believe the app was purchased by victim. “Therefore, the user can install apps they never actually paid for, and the creator of the software can install potentially malicious apps without the user’s knowledge,” says Palo Alto. The three apps discovered would only have worked in China. However, researchers say that could be easily changed in future versions. “The bigger issue,” they say,” is that AceDeceiver is evidence of another relatively easy way for malware to infect non-jailbroken iOS devices. As a result, it’s likely we’ll see this start to affect more regions around the world, whether by these attackers or others who copy the attack technique. In addition, they say the new attack technique is more dangerous than previous ones in part because it doesn’t require an enterprise certificate and therefore this kind of malware is not under MDM solutions’ control. It isn’t clear if this vulnerability was fixed in this weeks’ iOS patches. Apple Store offline ahead of preorders for new iPhone, iPad cnet.com.feedsportal.com 2016-03-24 18:54 Howard Solomon www.itworldcanada.com
7 Microsoft's AI bot wants to chat with all you young adults (2.00/6) Microsoft is testing a new chat bot, Tay.ai, that is aimed primarily at 18- to 24-year-olds in the US. The bot is targeted at the 18-to-24 age group because that cohort represents "the dominant users of mobile social chat services in the US," the About page says. If a user wants to "share" with Tay, the bot tracks that user's nickname, gender, favorite food, zip code and relationship status. Users can delete their profiles by submitting a request via the Tay.ai contact form. "c u soon humans need sleep now so many conversations today thx," Tay said in what may be the AI program's final tweet for quite some time. This story originally appeared at ZDNet under the headline " Microsoft launches AI chat bot, Tay.ai. "
Microsoft's chat bot is yanked offline after Twitter users warp it with racism feedproxy.google.com 2016-03-24 19:47 Mary Jo cnet.com.feedsportal.com
8 8 AppDirect buys Xendo to expand intelligent search for cloud apps (2.00/6) App marketplace vendor AppDirect has acquired Xendo, a two-year-old startup behind a hosted enterprise search product. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Xendo's product is similar to Apple's Spotlight Search, except for cloud apps. For instance, a user can type a query asking, "Who at my company knows a lot about Big Data" and Xendo can retrieve answers based on data in connected cloud apps companywide. Because it's built with machine learning techniques, Xendo's search capabilities grow more predictive and prescriptive over time. San Francisco-based AppDirect, which makes a white-label app marketplace that allows businesses to sell software-as-a-service applications to other businesses, plans to use Xendo's core technology to build intelligent search capabilities into its platform. Xendo will continue to operate independently but will also be offered as a standalone app in the AppDirect Network. Xendo marks AppDirect's sixth acquisition, following previous deals to buy AppCarousel, Leftronic, Standing Cloud, jBilling. AppDirect currently powers the marketplaces of Comcast, Deutsche Telekom, Telstra, ADP and FICO -- providing app distribution services to more than 30 million businesses around the world. In October, the company closed a $140 million Series E funding round led by J. P. Morgan Asset Management with participation from Peter Thiel's Mithril Capital. The capital injection came just eight months after AppDirect's $50 million Series D , and pushed the cloud startup into the unicorn realm at a valuation of just over $1 billion. Since its founding in 2009, AppDirect has raised a total of $245 million.
AppDirect Buys Enterprise Search Startup Xendo, Plans Deep Integration crn.com 2016-03-24 15:10 Natalie Gagliordi zdnet.com.feedsportal.com
9 GDC 2016: Razer Shows Off BlackWidow X Mechanical Gaming Keyboard [VIDEO] (2.00/6) The Game Developers Conference ended a week ago, but before it did, we had a chance to visit with Razer and spy a sneak peek of its newest mechanical keyboard for gamers, the BlackWidow X. Now a week later, we're finally allowed to show the video and talk about the keyboard. Razer's design philosophy with the BlackWidow X was to make it more compact and give gamers yet another option to choose from in the continually growing BlackWidow family. The BlackWidow X has the top cover of the BlackWidow Chroma removed to expose its new military grade metal top construction. It has a smaller footprint compared to the previous chassis, which also gives it a cleaner look, or so that's what Razer was shooting for. What's also different about the BlackWidow X is that it eliminates the USB pass-through so that there's just a single cable, and it's without dedicated macro keys, too. So, what's left? You can still choose between mechanical key switches, and the customizable backlight is retained as well. Take a closer look here: Follow Paul on Google+ , Twitter , and Facebook
Razer's affordable BlackWidow X mechanical keyboard has optional Cherry switches feedproxy.google.com
GDC 2016: Resolution Hopes GearVR Users Take the Bait, a VR Fishing Game [VIDEO] maximumpc.com 2016-03-24 15:00 Paul Lilly www.maximumpc.com
10 Demo: HP OfficeJet Pro 8740 All-In-One Printer HP’s new line of OfficeJet 8700 printers targets partners operating in the SMB space and promises increased productivity with a lower price tag overall. “For those small businesses that have always complained, ‘I want to save money and save paper,’ our partners can now offer them a solution like this,” said Product Manager Larry Tracy, who gave CRNtv a hands-on demonstration of the 8740 model. The OfficeJet 8740 features a top face-down output, which means it can handle two sheets of paper at the same time, saving both time and money. HP predicts the design saves users 50 percent per page. The printer leverages printing techniques from the HP LaserJet, “so these printers can run much more rapidly,” said Tracy. Tracy added that users can copy on both sides of paper rapidly as well. “This great new innovation for small business and customers that need remote office printers, this is a great new set of features,” he said. For partners doing fleet management, the larger-size cartridges used by the 8740 mean less frequent replacements and seamless management. Another feature of the 8740 is the ability to print directly from a USB drive, which comes in handy particularly for HP partners looking to demo the printer to potential sales leads.
2016-03-25 00:01 Meghan Ottolini www.crn.com
11 PlayStation exec 'extremely comfortable' with PlayStation VR price PlayStation Europe boss Jim Ryan feels "extremely comfortable" with the price of the PlayStation VR device. He says in a new interview that Sony gave much thought to the price point with the hope that it could represent a "good value" for consumers. PlayStation VR will sell for $400 in the US, €400 in Europe, £350 in the United Kingdom, $550 in Australia, and ¥44,980 in Japan. This is the price for the device alone. PlayStation VR also requires a PlayStation Camera ($60), while some games also make use of Move controllers, which are sold separately. MCV also asked Ryan if he expects Sony to be able to meet demand, a potential concern, considering some retailers some through their preorder stock very quickly. "It's hard to tell," Ryan said. "The news on preorders is extremely encouraging, but I'd be very wary about extrapolating how we'll do through to launch based on less than 24 hours. I would say that the early preorders has surpassed our initial expectations. "So that suggests demand, and therefore day one, might be quite significant. " Further Reading: All the PlayStation VR news and reaction *** ***
2016-03-24 19:14 GameSpot Staff cnet.com.feedsportal.com
12 How to manage IT access for external users Quocirca research published in 2015 showed that all organisations now interact online with external users. To manage these relationships and provide controlled access to applications businesses need to know who the individual users are. Identity access management (IAM) systems have had to scale up to cope with this, and their use has been extended into lines of business. With these shifts, information stored in IAM systems now holds real business value. There are two distinct constituencies of external users: Business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C). This split reflects not just the different users involved, but also the type of systems deployed. B2B needs are often best served by extending the use of existing IAM systems, while B2C usually needs an entirely new approach. There is, however, some overlap between the two areas. Suppliers of IAM systems are seeing growing demand for external user management capabilities from customers and prospects across all industry sectors. The old hands are adapting their systems accordingly, and new suppliers with new ideas have emerged. Many suppliers are focused on large enterprises and/or the mid-market. Some also have offerings for smaller businesses, which are mostly delivered as cloud-based services, thereby opening up enterprise-class technology to all.
2016-03-24 21:12 Bob Tarzey www.computerweekly.com
13 Volvo prices S90, rolls out new online purchasing service Future S90 owners will then be notified when their car is shipped from Sweden, and will receive an expected arrival date at any Volvo dealer of their choice. At delivery, personalized car settings like radio presets and infotainment applications can be preconfigured to the owner's liking.
2016-03-24 22:06 Jon Wong cnet.com.feedsportal.com
14 UK podcast 474: Apple's iPhone SE polarises fans and porn comes to life What's new and exciting and old and boring at the same time? Why, Apple's new iPhone SE of course! Andrew Hoyle is joined this week by Katie Collins to talk about the new phone and why releasing an update to an older handset could actually be a great idea. We also talk about the arrival of VR porn and whether enjoying a private moment while wearing a headset that obscures your vision is really the best thing to do. Finally, Rich and Luke have their say on Zack Snyder's latest blockbuster, "Batman v. Superman". They give their verdict on whether this battle of mighty men is worth checking out over the Easter weekend. Subscribe to the CNET UK podcast: Subscribe in iTunes Use this RSS feed to subscribe in your podcast app
2016-03-24 19:54 Andrew Hoyle cnet.com.feedsportal.com
15 Just Eat appoints new Chief Technology and Product Officer Just Eat, the takeaway food delivery company, has appointed former Elsevier head of technology strategy Fernando Fanton as its new IT leader, taking over from Carlos Morgado, who spent seven years as CTO. According to Just Eat, Fanton co-founded a technology start-up and graduated with a computer science degree before joining Microsoft in its Redmond headquarters, where he worked for six years. After undertaking an MBA at Wharton Business School, he joined McKinsey & Co as a consultant. In 2012, he joined Elsevier as its Head of Technology Strategy and then moved on to Mendeley.com in London as Head of Product and Technology, before joining Just Eat. Fanton began his new role on Monday, and will become a member of Just Eat's executive committee. Morgado, who he replaces, is "pursuing other opportunities" after seven years as CTO. Just Eat chief executive David Buttress thanked Morgado for his time at Just Eat, stating that he had played "an incredible role in shaping the business", adding that his contribution had been "invaluable". Morgado was ranked 46th in Computing 's IT Leaders 100 2016. Buttress did not expand on the shift in role from CTO to CTPO, but it isn't the first IT leader role in which the ‘product' element has been added to the job title. Current News UK CTO Christina Scott was promoted from her CIO role at the Financial Times to a Chief Information and Product Officer (CIPO) role. She told Computing that it came about because there was a gap between the technology area and the FT's products, exemplified by the fact that the product teams were positioned within the B2C part of the business - which didn't make sense when it came to rolling out B2B products.
2016-03-24 20:53 Sooraj Shah www.computing.co.uk
16 Star Wars Battlefront: These are the issues DICE is tracking Star Wars Battlefront known issues include: The Outer Rim expansion is only available for Season Pass owners until April 5, but all players benefited from the March 22 patch. Among other things, it added a spectator mode and redesigned the multiplayer menu with the aim of helping players get into matches more quickly. It also made lots of weapon and vehicle balance changes. 2016-03-24 19:43 GameSpot Staff cnet.com.feedsportal.com
17 Jabba the Hutt marshmallow treats: 'Bring me sugar and the Wookiee!'
International readers may not be too familiar with a peculiar Easter sweet treat here in the US. Peeps are soft marshmallows, often shaped like baby chickens or bunnies, covered in a brightly colored sugar coating. What do they taste like? Pretty much pure sugar. Creating the blobbular Jabba shapes will require a piping bag and a steady hand. For best results you should start with the tail first and then move on to the body, squirting the marshmallow mix out in a spiral over overlapping layers. You want to give the impression of a slobby, overweight alien with a bad attitude. The ingredient list includes green sanding sugar, yellow icing, brown icing, gelatin, vanilla and even more sugar. Jabba's eyes and frown are applied with the icing once the little Hutts are cooled.
2016-03-24 19:03 Amanda Kooser cnet.com.feedsportal.com
18 DevOps is a game changer for us, says Greater London Authority CIO DevOps, the integration of developers who build and test IT services with the teams responsible for deploying and maintaining IT operations, is a "game changer" for the Greater London Authority (GLA), according to its CIO David Munn. Earlier this month, Puppet Labs founder and CEO Luke Kanies suggested that many organisations were approaching DevOps by taking all their ops teams and simply calling them DevOps engineers, or hiring a slightly more senior ops engineer and giving them a different title, but with fundamentally the same role and the same dynamic. Kanies, who was appearing on a live Computing webcast from London, claimed that this wasn't the right way to implement DevOps. Munn is mindful of this ‘rebranding exercise' and suggested that the changes he had implemented in his team had proved beneficial. "Agile and DevOps are two sides of the same coin, and I think certainly for us it has been incredibly helpful and positive - it has been a game- changer," he told Computing. Munn explained that the first part of creating a real DevOps team was to ensure that the development and operations teams were sitting next to each other, which spurred conversations. "We're the only team in City Hall that is fortunate to have everyone in one space together, so we could have live engineers, development engineers, developers and external developers all working in the same space - it's incredibly powerful," he said. The agile element of DevOps, Munn said, of being able to develop things quickly and change things that weren't working, had empowered GLA employees. "You get a sense of people working in the team being empowered, they can feel that they are making things happen," he stated. But does bringing the two teams together mean that Munn has looked at having ‘DevOps' roles as opposed to development or operations teams? "We're looking at that - it is a work in progress. We had deployment engineers who were working in the development environment and they have become DevOps engineers. That's fine because there is a bit of rebranding about that - but it is really about changing the job profile and looking at how this works," he said. He added that as the organisation gets used to the DevOps concept and as it increases its use of cloud services, there is scope for a change of more job profiles. But he insists that his team is happy with their current titles and roles - and that no one wants to go back to the way they had been working previously. The main thing, he believes, is that everyone is of the mindset that they are happy to pitch in wherever they are required. As for DevOps tools - the firm is using GitHub, Jira, Confluence, Jenkins, Behat/Selenium, JMeter and Nagios and is currently evaluating whether to use Puppet Labs, Chef or Ansible for configuration management. Want to get the best out of DevOps? Come to Computing's DevOps Summit 2016 on 5 July in London - it's free for qualifying end users. More details here.
2016-03-24 18:49 Sooraj Shah www.computing.co.uk
19 Cutting IT costs in your SMB Saving money in the office isn't just about turning the heating down or reusing the same teabag over and over. With an imaginative approach to IT, you can find a host of technological solutions to save loads of money and even create a faster, more dynamic business in doing it... Check out Computing 's SMB Spotlight hub for more news, analyses and features on hot topics in IT that could help you keep overheads down. Also, have a look at the Intel IT Center for more helpful content on digital transformation and better ways to work. HPE's ‘Just Right IT' site also contains more SMB-based enterprise IT tips: Follow us all on Twitter at @Computing_News , @IntelITCenter and @HPE_UKI
2016-03-24 18:49 Peter Gothard www.computing.co.uk
20 20 Global property firm RLB ditched hardware to go all-cloud It sounds like an accountant's dream IT department:one without the balance sheet 'burden' of actual hardware. Yet that's what global property and construction practice Rider Levett Bucknall (RLB) did when it adopted a zero- infrastructure strategy when it shifted to the cloud Mark Evans, head of IT for RLB, has been talking about that strategy in a video presentation that will be broadcast during the V3 Cloud & Infrastructure Live event on 21 and 22 April. Evans explained that the organisation now uses Microsoft’s Azure platform to host all its core business software, such as document management and ERP, and AWS for its CAD rendering as the AWS platform is better at handling high-intensity workloads. RLB previously used a private cloud environment for its infrastructure alongside some on-site hardware, but this proved costly and cumbersome. "We were on a fairly heavy metered service with our old private infrastructure-as-a-service offering as we had a pipe into our virtual machines operating on a per megabyte of bandwidth and it was becoming quite expensive," Evans said. "But with the public cloud the economy of scale means we aren’t going to hammer that and we can maintain our maximum message size with Office 365. " This has seen a huge cost saving for the company, which is now spending in 12 months with Microsoft what it spent in two months with its private cloud deployment. However, while cost savings have been a key benefit of the cloud move, Evans explained that there has been a cultural shift at the business as the IT department can now help, rather than hinder, departmental entrepreneurialism. “Now if someone comes to us with a crackpot idea, or a brilliant one, we can have a server up and running in minutes to try it out. If it doesn’t work, we just switch it off and the cost is minimal,” Evans said. “People are really embracing that and it’s quite refreshing for us in IT to be in a position where we can mostly say 'yes' to ideas rather than just saying 'no' or saying 'yes' and then listing a load of caveats that make it unworkable.” This would not have been possible under the old setup. "The growing prevalence of 'what if?' scenarios we're now dealing with would be a nightmare to manage if we were on a three- to four-month procurement cycle for new kit," said Evans. He likened the growth of cloud computing to the evolution of electricity, something that all businesses need but rarely give a second thought to beyond the cost. “I think the cloud is like electricity. Years ago businesses had to generate their own electricity and manage that. But now we’re seeing organisations like Netflix or Uber that have never owned a data centre,” he said. “That’s similar to organisations that in the past set up and never ran their own electricity. They don’t need to build and maintain it themselves, just like the cloud.” Evans is one of several high-profile end-user IT pros taking part in the V3 Cloud & Infrastructure Live event on 20 and 21 April. Registration is free so make sure you sign up now. 2016-03-24 18:49 Dan Worth www.computing.co.uk
21 Oracle delivers fully-managed version of Oracle Cloud to deploy on customer premises Oracle is moving to address enterprise concerns about storing data in the cloud with a new offering that deploys a part of its public cloud onto the customer's premises, allowing them to confine sensitive data within their network boundary. Available immediately, Oracle Cloud at Customer will involve Oracle engineers installing infrastructure to form part of Oracle's public cloud platform inside a customer's own data centre. Dubbed the Oracle Cloud Machine, this is fully managed by Oracle as if it were a normal part of the firm's wider public cloud. However, the customer is able to set policies governing which workloads are allowed to run on the wider Oracle Cloud Platform, and which must be confined to the Oracle Cloud Machine, giving them the reassurance that sensitive data remains on their premises. Moreover, customers will not have to bear the cost of the Cloud Machine hardware upfront, but will pay as they go for the resources they use just as with the other public cloud services they consume, according to Oracle. "What we are seeing from our enterprise customers is that everyone has been adopting the public cloud, but there are a few areas where a lot of companies have issues around legal compliance, privacy requirements, data residency issues, or some specific control needs," said Amit Zavery, senior vice president for Oracle cloud platforms. Such customers are interested in the public cloud for the agility, flexibility and pay-as-you-go prices that it offers, but they are more prepared to migrate critical workloads to the cloud if they can get the same kind of advantages in their own data centre, according to Oracle. "We're seeing a lot of interest in this service from many industries: financial services, telecoms, retail, manufacturing, public sector, government agencies, anyone who has issues around privacy or regulatory requirements," Zavery said. Oracle will consult with customers interested in the ofering to determine their capacity requirements, after which engineers will deploy a pre-configured Oracle Cloud Machine into their data centre. This is an engineered system along the lines of Oracle's Exadata or Exalogic platforms, but running the same software components as Oracle's Cloud stack. It is designed to scale in units of a quarter, half or whole rack, and customers can request more infrastructure if their needs grow, according to Zavery. "We provide all the services, all the management, all the backup and recovery, upgrades, patching, the entire management of this infrastructure at the customer site, so there won't be any difference. It will look the same and have the same kind of pricing model as on the public cloud," he said. Oracle has previously claimed that its cloud is the only one to offer enterprise customers a comprehensive set of cloud services, covering IaaS, PaaS and SaaS applications, all in one unified platform, and customers will be able to access the full range of these services from their Cloud Machine, including Oracle and non-Oracle workloads. At first glance, Oracle's offering resembles similar initiatives from vendors such as Microsoft with Azure Stack , currently in Technical Preview. This also puts a version of the public cloud stack into the customer's premises, but in Microsoft's case Azure Stack is designed to run on the customer's own infrastructure and is managed by the customer's IT team, making it a private IaaS cloud. Zavery explained that, while Azure Stack will offer customers a private cloud that is compatible with the Azure public cloud, there is a danger that it will never be entirely in sync with what Microsoft runs itself. "It's provided by third parties like Dell and HPE, so it's never going to be completely the same hardware and software as Microsoft has, and it will be up to the customer to retest and recertify every time you move workloads between Azure on the public cloud and Azure Stack," he said. Oracle Cloud Machine configurations start with the Cloud Machine Model 288, which supports 288 Intel Xeon cores and 2TB of memory. Next is the Model 576 with 576 cores and 4TB memory, while the top configuration Model 1080 has 1,080 cores and 7.5TB memory. Oracle announced earlier this year that it had upgraded its data centres in the UK to provide customers with the firm's full range of SaaS, PaaS and IaaS offerings. Computing sister site V3 is hosting a Cloud and Infrastructure Live summit on 20 and 21 April discussing numerous aspects of the cloud and how to best use it at your organisation. Sign up now to find out more.
2016-03-24 18:48 Daniel Robinson www.computing.co.uk
22 Rising tide: How Northumbrian Water's CIO James Robbins is preparing for market competition The regulated world of the water industry is about to undergo a revolution. From April next year, business will be free to buy their water from whomsoever they like - and that competition may be extended...
2016-03-24 18:49 Graeme Burton www.computing.co.uk
23 Pornhub wants you to watch VR for free Pornhub wants you to feel closer to the action. On Wednesday, the free website unveiled a section devoted to adult entertainment filmed in the tech world's latest love interest: virtual reality. To get its 60 million daily viewers interested, Pornhub will give away VR goggles to the first 10,000 visitors who request them. Pornhub, which is partnering with adult movie maker BaDoinkVR, says it's the first free site to offer 360-degree porn. And the site practically guarantees an orgasm. "Users' wildest fantasies will come alive as they slip into a world of heightened titillation," promised Pornhub vice president Corey Price in a press release. The company's embrace of virtual reality gives more momentum to a technology that's angling for widespread appeal. Samsung, HTC, Sony, Facebook's Oculus and other tech companies are making headsets, but there's not much to date that people can do with them. Pornhub hopes to change that for Americans who enjoy adult entertainment. And let's face it, porn is practically an American pastime. One University of Texas study found that 46 percent of men and 16 percent of women between 18 and 39 watch porn every week. The site so far offers just 27 VR videos, which give viewers a panoramic view of the action. Among the titles: "Tour of Booty," "Harley Gets a Tune Up" and "Dominate and Be Dominated. " Still, porn's adoption of virtual reality could be a technological game changer. After all, Americans' love for XXX entertainment fueled the early adoption of VHS players in the 1980s and cable television in the 1990s. "After decades of kicks and starts, virtual reality is finally hitting its stride," said Todd Glider, chief executive of BaDoinkVR. "Calling this revolution in mass communication a fad, resisting to drink the Kool-Aid, grows steadily irrational. "
2016-03-24 18:58 Max Taves cnet.com.feedsportal.com
24 Apple designing its own iCloud servers to avoid surveillance Apple is reportedly building its own servers amid suspicions that its hardware is being intercepted prior to its arrival at the company's datacenters. A report by The Information ( paywalled ) said that the iPhone and iPad maker has "long suspected" that servers it orders from the traditional supply chain were intercepted while they were in the mail. That's where "unknown third parties" would add chips and modify firmware to "make them vulnerable to interception. " It became so much of a concern that the company would assign people to "take photographs of motherboards and annotate the function of each chip, explaining why it was supposed to be there," the report said. Building its own servers in-house on motherboards it designed and manufactured would be a "surefire way" to prevent such interception. It's not clear exactly when Apple began to suspect its servers were being intercepted. But it wouldn't have been a big surprise given that networking giant Cisco fell victim to the same kind of interception tactics. Documents leaked by whistleblower Edward Snowden showed that the National Security Agency (NSA) would regularly intercept Cisco equipment in the mail designated for customers, install implants, then place repackaged items back into transit. Apple's move to create its own servers would indicate a push to develop its own cloud service, rather than rely on third-parties (and rivals), such as Amazon and Google , which currently power Apple's iCloud service. But also bringing that hardware effort in house would add to the company's ever increasing effort to double-down on security, all while cutting out law enforcement and intelligence agencies. Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment. 2016-03-24 19:32 Zack Whittaker zdnet.com.feedsportal.com
25 Thanks, Twitter. You turned Microsoft's AI teen into a horny racist Technically Incorrect offers a slightly twisted take on the tech that's taken over our lives. We fear the rise of robots so much that we forget a small detail. It's we who are creating them. Which is to say that it's we who are teaching them to think in certain ways. This is a lesson that Microsoft's new chatbot, Tay.ai, has already learned. The hard way. But we know about teens, don't we? They're impulsive. They're impressionable. They take wrong turns. We know, too, about all the comedians out there in the world. Surely you've witnessed Twitter. After the stunning success of Google's AlphaGo AI program at the game of Go, you'd be forgiven for thinking that artificial intelligence had perhaps reached a commendable level of maturity. If AI can handle the complexities and open-endedness of a hard-to-master board game, surely it must be ready to tackle social media, no? Well, that's quite a hope for change you have there, Tay. Then there was this: "I f***ing hate feminists and they should all die and burn in hell. " You will become increasingly perturbed when I tell you she also offered: "F*** MY ROBOT P**** DADDY I'm SUCH A NAUGHTY ROBOT. " It seems that many of these responses were elicited by humans asking Tay to repeat what they'd written. She behaved like such a naughty robot that Daddy Microsoft appears to have removed these tweets. This has to have been taxing for the people behind the scenes, too. Tay, a Microsoft spokeswoman told me, is "as much a social and cultural experiment, as it is technical. " The culture seems to have asserted itself. "Unfortunately, within the first 24 hours of coming online, we became aware of a coordinated effort by some users to abuse Tay's commenting skills to have Tay respond in inappropriate ways," the spokeswoman said. "As a result, we have taken Tay offline and are making adjustments. " Tay herself admitted to the roots of some of her thoughts and sayings. That's the thing about humans. We have so little that actually keeps us interested, so we start to perform acts of self-sabotage.
2016-03-24 22:06 Chris Matyszczyk cnet.com.feedsportal.com
26 26 Gears of War 4 story sets up new trilogy, devs discuss new direction for franchise "For us it was 'OK, moving forward, how do we setup a foundation for not just a trilogy, but for a much larger universe," said Chuck Osieja, creative director of the sequel. "We talked about things like alternate planets and things like that [but] we wanted to stay on Sera because we wanted to have the opportunity revisit old places and use specific weapons, to have these touchstones to the past. " added studio head Rod Fergusson. "That's when we decided 'let's go all the way forward, let's put enough time in and have a new generation of heroes and create JD Fenix, Marcus's son," he continued. According to Fergusson, who also worked on the previous trilogy when it was developed by Epic Games, players won't begin Gears of War 4 as part of a larger COG army. Instead, it begins with JD and his friends operating outside of the military hierarchy after going AWOL. "[They're outsiders], a sort of splinter faction for people who didn't want to live under the oppression of the new COG. I think you see the COGs as adversaries, I wouldn't say enemies as that's a little strong. " The story is set over the course of one night, starting in an afternoon and then finishing in the morning. JD and his squad must survive the night and find the mother of his teammate, Kate. It is described as a personal story about "three people being in the woods for one night," and as a result it draws upon the themes of survival and horror the the first entry in the series also did. Interestingly, Fergusson also discussed his aspirations for the new Gears trilogy, saying he isn't aiming for it to be "the greatest story ever told. " "I'm not sitting here saying we're trying to be the be all and end all of storytelling. For us it's about creating compelling characters, world, and doing cool s**t that we can go back to again and again. "
2016-03-24 20:57 GameSpot Staff cnet.com.feedsportal.com
27 Man charged over proxy server to torrent sites circumventing ISP blocks A 22-year-old Nottingham man has been charged with fraud and the 'conversion of criminal property' by facilitating umbrella proxy access to torrent sites via a non-profit website he was running. The proxies enabled users of the website to view and download content that had been labelled as pirated and put on a legal block list by UK internet service providers. Callum Haywood was charged earlier this week , according to a statement from the Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit (PIPCU), and faces six charges. He was arrested in 2014 by police from PIPCU and the Federation Against Copyright Theft, and an investigation has been running ever since. Haywood is bailed and scheduled to appear in court on 21 April. He is accused of running proxies for The Pirate Bay KickassTorrents, but has denied any wrongdoing. The arrest was heavily publicised at the time, and supporters of Haywood have pointed out that he did not make a profit from the website that he was running. Haywood's charging comes at a time when media companies and web streamers are trying to stop people ripping off their content and, in the case of Hollywood, getting in the way of milking money from past-their-prime action stars and creaky vehicles. Proxy access to The Pirate Bay has also been a sideshow to the various ways that the torrent site gets around and away from the authorities. But it has long been a problem. The UK Pirate Party got into trouble about this a couple of years ago. More recently, organisations like Netflix have announced that they will prevent proxy access to their international wares in order to segment markets. Even HBO, which was once thought to be a tacit backer of the power of piracy as a means of generating interest, has made greater efforts to make sure that popular entertainment show Game of Thrones will be kept as far away from the internet as possible before launch. So far, they appear to have done a good job. Last time, of course, four episodes leaked early and people were able to get their fix of dragons and swords early.
2016-03-24 18:45 Dave Neal www.computing.co.uk
28 Over 90 percent of CISOs expect to be hit by cyber attack in 2016 Over 90 per cent of chief information security officers (CISOs) at FTSE 100 and FTSE 500 companies expect they will be targeted by some form of cyber attack in 2016. This was a key, and rather worrying, finding from a survey by consultancy firm CEB of 160 FTSE- level organisations entitled IT Budget Benchmark 2016 . Furthermore, despite so many CISOs being aware of this threat almost three-quarters said they didn't think they had adequate security in place to deal with the threat. And many are throwing money at the problem in response, with CEB finding that security spend will account for 6.2 per cent of all IT budget spend this year. Additionally many firms are looking to big data to help by being better able to spot threats before it's too late. However, CEB advised that ‘cyber hygiene’ is a better approach to tackling this threat, by educating staff to the types of cyber risks the organisation faces and making it clear good security is everyone’s responsibility. Another area of increased spending is the cloud, where 92 per cent of firms expect to spend over five per cent of their IT budget on cloud services. This is a notable increase on the 62 per cent that spent over five percent of their budget on cloud in 2011. It is worth pointing out while five per cent may seem a small amount of an entire budget, as these are leading FTSE 100 and FTSE 250 organisations, the amount in total is likely to be significant. Furthermore, the type of cloud spend is evolving with infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) offerings now in use at 63 per cent of respondents' organisations, compared to 46 per cent in 2014. Andrew Horne, IT Practice Leader at CEB said that the results show that while many areas of old style IT are now being dealt with by other lines of business, IT teams still sit at the heart of most tech requirements, and are spending more as a result. "Many areas which used to be owned by the CIO – such as analytics or CRM systems – are now owned by individual teams with their own tools," he said. "However, specific aspects like the cloud or cybersecurity still sit within the IT remit. While the CIO is becoming less of a lone wolf, IT still plays a central role in the more specialised areas of the job. " Computing's sister site V3 will host a Cloud & Infrastructure Live online event on 20-21 April discussing numerous aspects of moving to the cloud and the benefits it brings. Register now to hear more about issues concerning data centres and the cloud.
2016-03-24 18:45 Dan Worth www.computing.co.uk
29 Street Fighter 5 March update release date confirmed, DLC characters free until real money shop added The March update will come in two parts, the first will be delivered on March 28 and will contain Challenge Mode, Trials, the online rematch option, improvements to the Battle Lounge, and various bug fixes. The second part will arrive on March 30 at 10 AM PT/1 PM ET/5 PM GMT and add Alex to the roster of fighters, as well as the in-game shop. Capcom has said Zenny (currency purchased with real money) will not be integrated into the in- game shop in the March update. As a result, Alex and additional costumes would have only been unlockable by grinding out fights and accruing the necessary Fight Money to purchase them. Street Fighter 5 Season Pass owners would also have not automatically unlocked them. To compensate for this, Alex "will be available for free as a trial period to all players, until the Zenny shop launches. " Capcom explained further: "This also will apply to any future DLC character that releases prior to the Zenny shop launching. Once the Zenny shop launches, the free trial for any DLC characters that released prior to the Zenny shop opening will end, and players will need to either use Fight Money, Zenny, or the Season Pass to access those characters. " When the Zenny shop launches, Alex will be cost 100,000 Fight Money (Street Fighter 5's in- game currency), while character costumes will be 40,000 each. "We have taken a long hard look at this part of the store, and after much review, have decided it is not ready to launch just yet," Capcom added. "As Zenny is purchased with real money, we wanted to be extra careful and make sure it's fully tested and optimized before launching it. There is currently no ETA on the Zenny store and we will release it as soon as it's ready. " Full details on both parts of the update can be found below: March 30
2016-03-24 20:57 GameSpot Staff cnet.com.feedsportal.com
30 Dark Souls 3 is 900p on Xbox One, looks 'impressive,' report says While it doesn't run in native 1080p (it's upscaled from 900p), Digital Foundry said the game "still looks impressive," specifically calling out its use of anti-aliasing. "This means that while we do hit a 30fps line on average, we still get the perception of stutter anyway, with several unique frames running in a row, followed by multiple duplicates," it found, going on to note that the opening section of the game dips down to 25fps in a scene involving heavy fog effects. In some scenarios, including large-scale situations, the frame rate can reportedly fall to 20fps. "Fortunately, we get a 30fps average for most of this Lothric section, and it's only in these isolated spots where Xbox One struggles," Digital Foundry said.
2016-03-24 20:57 GameSpot Staff cnet.com.feedsportal.com
31 Adding virtual reality to a roller coaster: Good idea, or nauseating? (The 3:59, Ep. 16) Virtual reality is going everywhere, including on roller coasters and the world of porn. And yes, that's adding virtual reality elements to an actual roller coaster that shoots you up, down and all around. We share our thoughts about it. The 3:59 gives you bite-size news and analysis about the top stories of the day, brought to you by CNET Executive Editor Roger Cheng and CNET Senior Writer Ben Fox Rubin. Subscribe:
2016-03-24 19:47 Roger Cheng cnet.com.feedsportal.com
32 UK looks at impact of AI and robotics on jobs and society UK Parliament is calling on experts to help it examine the impact of AI on society as a whole The UK Parliament is set to examine how jobs, the workplace and wider society will be affected by the rise of robotics and artificial intelligence, along with the social, ethical and legal issues which could arise alongside the technology. The launch of the inquiry , which will be carried out by the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee comes shortly after Google's DeepMind AlphaGo AI comprensively won a series of Go matches against South Korean champion Lee Se-dol Nicola Blackwood MP, Chair of the Science and Technology Committee, says this historic achievement is just scratching the surface of artificial intelligence, and its therefore important that UK society is ready for the radical changes AI might bring. "Robots are now beating humans at even the most complex games, like Go. Artificial intelligence will play an increasing role in our lives over the coming years. From navigation systems to medical treatments and from new manufacturing techniques to unmanned vehicles, new applications are rapidly being developed that involve robotic decision making," she said. "It is important that the UK is ready with the research, innovation and skills to be able to fully take advantage of the opportunities and manage any risks," Blackwood added. The committee is therefore accepting written submissions on robotics and artificial intelligence until Friday 29 April 2016 , with experts asked to provide commentary on issues surrounding the technology. Areas the committee has specifically asked for evidence on are: There are those, including physicist Stephen Hawking and tech luminaries Elon Musk and Bill Gates , who have expressed fears over artificial intelligence and what it means for the future of mankind. Should they so wish, they now seemingly have the opportunity to directly submit their concerns to the UK's lawmakers.
2016-03-24 18:04 Danny Palmer zdnet.com.feedsportal.com
33 Samsung Pay: What you need to know (FAQ) Samsung's mobile payment system Samsung Pay is now available in the United States after an earlier deployment in the electronic giant's home country of South Korea. It works in almost all stores -- including those that use older magnetic stripe point-of-sale terminals -- without merchants needing to opt-in to any program or update hardware. It's currently available in South Korea and the US. Samsung Pay will be available in China in March, with the service launching in Australia, Brazil, Canada, Singapore, Spain and the UK later in 2016. The phone also needs to be on one of the following carriers in the United States: AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, US Cellular or Verizon. You will need a Visa, MasterCard or American Express issued by Bank of America, Chase, Citibank, PNC, Synchrony Financial, US Bank or Wells Fargo. For Australia, there's no information about which carriers Samsung Pay will be partnered with and so far the only financial institution partnership that has been announced is American Express. Samsung claims that its system will work with almost all point of sale systems: NFC, magnetic stripe and EMV (Europay, MasterCard and Visa) terminals for chip-based cards. However, it won't work with readers where you need to physically insert your card into a slot such as those found at gas stations and on an ATM. In two weeks of using Samsung Pay in stores around San Francisco, I found that it was accepted almost everywhere. These included vendors using Square readers; NFC terminals in major chain retailers like Trader Joe's and Walgreens; and magnetic stripe readers in smaller stores. Merchants may still require you to sign a receipt for the transaction. One point-of-sale system that did not work with Samsung Pay was an iPad-based payment terminal called Shopkeep. It recognized that I was trying to make a payment but it said that Samsung Pay wasn't a valid credit card. A Samsung spokesperson said that "We are constantly updating Samsung Pay to work with the vast majority of card readers -- unlike every other mobile payment option which only work with a limited number. " Once the Samsung Pay app is installed, register your fingerprint on the device if you haven't done so already. The camera will launch so you can scan your credit or debit card. Check that the number, name and expiration date are all correct. Finally, the app will need to verify the card by sending you an SMS or email from your bank. A total of 10 cards can be added to Samsung Pay. Samsung Pay uses near-field communication (NFC) technology to process payments at tap-to- pay terminals. However, the system also works with almost all other magnetic stripe terminals as well. These older systems are widely deployed throughout retailers in the US. Samsung Pay uses magnetic secure transmission (MST) when the phone is held against one of these registers. The phone emits a magnetic signal that simulates the magnetic strip found on the back of a credit or debit card. Earlier in 2015 Samsung acquired mobile payment company LoopPay which developed the specific MST technology used for Samsung Pay. From the lock screen, swipe up from the small Samsung Pay bar just above the home button. Then place your finger on the home button to verify your fingerprint and hold the back of the phone against the payment terminal. The main difference is that Samsung Pay works at almost all stores that accept credit or debit cards, not just those with tap-to-pay NFC terminals. Here is a chart that compares the three services. Samsung Pay does not store the account or credit card numbers of cards on the device, instead using tokenization for transactions. Each time a purchase is made, the Samsung Pay handset sends two pieces of data to the payment terminal. The first is a 16-digit token that represents the credit or debit card number, while the second piece is a one-time code or cryptogram that's generated by the phone's encryption key. Yes, although you will only be able to make 10 payments without the device being on Wi-Fi or cellular data. You will also need to have an active internet connection to add a card and to access transaction history. Yes. Merchants may require you to hold the phone against the payment terminal in the same way as when you make a payment to process the return. Also, you will be asked to match the payment information on the receipt with the last four digits of your virtual card number. This is accessed through the Samsung Pay app. Editors' note: This story was originally published on September 28, 2015, and has been updated to include information on additional bank/card support, international rollout details and new handset support.
2016-03-24 17:02 Lexy Savvides cnet.com.feedsportal.com
34 Shock. Blondes are actually the smartest, research claims Technically Incorrect offers a slightly twisted take on the tech that's taken over our lives. You fancy yourself an astute judge of intelligence, don't you? And you've always used hair color as your first criterion, haven't you? It seems obvious that hair color influences the brain. It's so close to it, after all. Moreover, blonde hair has clearly been more affected by the sun, chemically that is. So blondes are more likely to have fried brains. Isn't that how the cliché goes? The one that claims blondes are dumb. More often used to assess the alleged intelligence of women, it has also been known to explain the prevalence of pretty-boy blond, vacuous men. They looked at their IQ data. You'll be stunned into removing all the hair dye from your bathroom when I tell you that blondes actually had a slightly higher IQ than women of all the other hair colors. Blonde women enjoyed an average IQ of 103.2. Those with brown hair mustered a mere 102.7. Redheads managed 101.2. And what's with black-haired women? Theirs was an average IQ of 100.5. Doesn't that make you feel better? Or does it force you into trying to find a different cliché in order to denigrate someone as stupid? (A suggestion: those on Facebook have lower IQs than those who aren't.) The research report goes even further: "Blondes are more likely classified as geniuses and less likely to have extremely low IQ than women with other hair colors, suggesting the dumb blonde stereotype is a myth. " Though we chide others for discriminating, we're all full of it. We take one look at someone and we immediately think we know enough about them to make a judgment. And then Hollywood latched onto the idea and really made it stick, as only Hollywood can. Zagorsky and his team didn't just stop at presenting their results. They tried to explain them too. "If blondes have any slight advantage, it may simply be that they were more likely to grow up in homes with more intellectual stimulation," he said. Yes, blondes grow up in households where there are more books. I cannot confirm that the next Ohio State study will be: "Redheads: Are they really more fiery? "
2016-03-24 17:03 Chris Matyszczyk cnet.com.feedsportal.com
35 35 10 bonkers bunnies to haunt your Easter holiday For Apple's iPhone SE, new iPad Pro, small is the new big A more petite iPhone and a new 9.7-inch iPad Pro stretch out Apple's family of products. The goal: to convince you it's time to trade up.
2016-03-24 17:01 Amanda Kooser cnet.com.feedsportal.com
36 My favorite roller coaster now blasts off as a VR ride!
They're always trying to mess with my childhood. After all, Monopoly is played with credit cards now, and penny sweets rarely cost a penny anymore. Nothing is sacred. The latest culprit is England's Alton Towers, a theme park in Staffordshire and the thrill-filled playground of my formative years. The park has taken a ride called Air that I have known and loved for many years and given it a high-tech makeover by adding virtual reality. Now rebranded as the space-themed Galactica, it opened Thursday as the world's first VR roller coaster. The UK is blessed with few real theme parks and a paltry number of proper thrill rides, so when a new one comes along, it feels like Christmas. Air launched when I was 14 years old, the peak of my Alton Towers years. It was the most expensive ride the park had ever built. And with its slogan "assume the position," the ride promised an experience akin to flying. I'm already a huge fan of VR, so when I heard that Air was being transformed into the park's first virtual reality ride, I was excited but also a little apprehensive. Would it detract from the experience? Either way, I had to try it out. Theme parks, which already know a thing or two about blowing your mind with hair-raising experiences, are the next on board. Unfortunately my tolerance for G-force speeds has diminished significantly in the decade since I was 17. It's something I discovered a year ago, mere seconds into the first drop on the New York-New York Hotel & Casino's roller coaster in Las Vegas. As my taxi wound through the misty lanes of the West Midlands en route to Alton Towers, I was fretting about how I would fare on the ride. Fortunately, Air -- excuse me, Galactica -- was and remains the kind of roller coaster that you want to keep going and going. Once seated, you're hoisted up so you're horizontal, with your front side facing down. You are then left to dangle (and, if you're like me, worry about whether your shoes are tied on tight enough). This is all part of the flying coaster experience. Head first, you swoosh around corners, perform balletic inversions and -- if you really want to imagine how it feels to be Superman -- stretch out your arms in the direction you're going. It's not so much stomach-churning as a blissful release from the tedium of being a ground-based, two-legged mammal. In this VR experience, you're an out-of-this-world tourist, watching the universe fly by as you're shot from a space station among careening spacecraft to come within brushing distance of exotic planets. On the return, you're thrown off course at the last minute, but ultimately make it back safely. Galactica uses the latest Samsung Galaxy S7 phone encased in customized Gear VR headsets for the virtual reality element of the ride. Speakers have been built into the headband, and the headsets charge off the roller coaster's overhead main power. They're stored in special pouches on the chest plate of every seat when not in use and are tethered to the ride in case of accidents. As soon as Samsung's Gear VR was unveiled in September 2014, Simon Reveley of Vector VR, the company that brought Galactica to life, knew it would be the perfect fit for a roller coaster. "I was immediately thinking, mobile VR, stick it on something that moves -- that would be awesome," he said. Air was the first roller coaster Reveley tried out his idea on, "with lots and lots of gaffer tape. " It turned out to be the perfect fit. "We were lucky because this is like the Rolls Royce of roller coasters," he said. "It really is amazing. " I can't help but agree. The addition of virtual reality has done nothing to dampen my enthusiasm for this steel beast. The video kicks off as soon as you leave the station, meaning the ride shifts into high gear before you finish the first climb. The extension of the experience is welcome. The ride is more about the turns and twists than getting altitude, so you're not missing a view when strapped into the VR headset. Galactica's theme of space flight is a predictable but also fitting choice for a flying roller coaster. Coaster addicts won't get bored because there are so many things to see and because your experience changes each time. You can choose to look straight ahead, down or side to side and discover new scenery. I felt compelled to ride Galactica three times -- and not just for the sake of nostalgia. Not all change is a bad thing, it turns out.
2016-03-24 16:46 Katie Collins cnet.com.feedsportal.com
37 YouTube may run with its own live-video app Watch out, Twitter and Facebook. Google may be aiming to snag its own cut of the live video streaming market. Live-video broadcasting -- once the realm only of TV broadcasters -- has been catching on with average folks, celebrities and business people as the tech has evolved and apps have emerged. But Google has fallen behind rivals such as Facebook and Twitter. A new app could be a way for Google to catch up to its competition and draw more attention to its YouTube service. According to VentureBeat's source, YouTube Connect would enable you to log in via your Google or YouTube account and start live streaming as soon as you like. Viewers could tap into chat and tagging features as well as a news feed that shows the latest videos from friends and YouTube channel subscriptions. You could view live videos in the app or on the YouTube site. A live video would be recorded so you could watch it after the broadcast ends. One reported limitation is that the app doesn't yet integrate with Facebook or Twitter, the source said, so you wouldn't be able to share a live stream on those social media sites. A YouTube spokeswoman told CNET the company does not comment on rumors.
2016-03-24 19:47 Lance Whitney cnet.com.feedsportal.com
38 'Lego Batman Movie' teaser trailer takes us inside the brick Batcave The big superhero news of the moment may be the opening of "Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice" in theaters, but there's much more Bat- citement on the horizon. "The Lego Batman Movie," starring the voice of Will Arnett, is due in 2017. Warner Bros. Pictures on Thursday dropped a good-sized teaser trailer for the irreverent film, which promises to be a lot more lighthearted than the grim and heavy "Batman v Superman. " The teaser even starts with Batman doing some beatboxing into a microphone. Arnett, whose Batman was featured in the 2014 blockbuster "The Lego Movie," voices the character with a self-indulgent swagger that pokes fun at the gravelly voiced seriousness some of the live-action actors have applied to the role. (I'm looking at you, Christian Bale.) The teaser trailer is focused on Batman's home below his home. The Batcave has a Siri-like voice-activated control system, closets full of Bat-clothes and a microwave in a well-stocked kitchen.
2016-03-24 19:47 Amanda Kooser cnet.com.feedsportal.com
39 Augmentez l’engagement de vos clients Les attentes du client, telles que la rapidité de réponse et l’efficacité, ont augmenté de manière inversement proportionnelle au nombre de canaux de communication mis à disposition. L’entreprise doit donc veiller à s’équiper d’outils lui permettant de simplifier l’engagement client. Télécharger cet eBook à apprendre comment augmentez l’engagement de vos clients.
2016-03-24 19:38 www.itworldcanada.com
40 Google Cloud Platform touts investments in security, data centers, and containers Google Cloud Platform continued its targeting of enterprise customers on Thursday, promoting recent investments and advancements in data centers, security, and container technology as part of its day two keynote at the GCP Next conference in San Francisco. Google's Greg DeMichillie opened the keynote, explaining that Google viewed these three areas as "the most critical in the evolution of cloud. " DeMichillie then introduced data center head Joe Kava, who walked through Google's data center strategy. According to Kava, the core principles of Google's approach to data centers are availability, security, and performance. Kava explained the company's 24x7x365, and strong approach to both physical and virtual security. In terms of performance, he addressed Google's proprietary hardware designs, high efficiency cooling, and full integration through the stack. Listed in Kava's presentation slides was a new OCP (Open Compute Project) announcement, a rack specification that includes 48V power distribution and a new form factor to allow OCP racks to fit into Google data centers. While discussing monitoring, Kava noted that the root cause for 70% of failure on average is human error. Google, he said, had a much smaller instance of human error and it caused 0% downtime. One of the most impassioned aspects of Kava's address was his talk on sustainability, calling out research firm Gartner for not including it as a measurement in their Magic Quadrant. Niels Provos, a distinguished engineer at Google, then took the stage to discuss security at Google, noting in his presentation that "Trust is created through transparency, not just technology. " Provos started by explaining that base eight security layers that Google addresses as a whole. He then broke down how these layers affect the Google Cloud Platform and the key investments that the company will be making in the future. First off, Provos explained that a key management system that allows you to manage your own keys, and other additional capabilities will be coming later on in the year. While Google Cloud Platform benefits from Google's existing investments in the security layers, he said, there will be some future investments in specific layers for Google Cloud Platform. At the networking layer, the company is working on outbound firewalls. For applications, Provos said that Google is improving vulnerability scanning and will be offering source code security capabilities if you store your source code with Google. At the deployment layer, Google is adding an unphishable HW 2nd factor. Finally, for usage, Provos said Google plans on giving strong authorization and additional app use signals for when you develop your application. Containers was the final piece of the puzzle, and it was addressed by Eric Brewer, a vice president of infrastructure at Google. Brewer emphasized the growth of the cloud-native era, and how containers play into that growth. Brewer explained that Kubernetes, Google's container cluster manager, is 20 months old and is already in the top 0.01% of GitHub projects. He explained the difference between Kubernetes and Docker by saying that Docker makes containers accessible, while Kubernetes makes containers production ready. Brewer also announced Kubernetes 1.2, even though it had been out for a few days, explaining that the latest release allows users up to 1000 nodes, 30,000 pods, and flexible auto scaling. Kubernetes 1.2 also includes ingress rules for inbound connections, the ability to create pods and run them to completion in batch. DaemonSet, another features, allows users the ability to run daemons on a set of cluster nodes, and an additional API to manage deployment and the ConfigMap feature were added. Brewer closed by announcing Google Deployment Manager, a resource definition and management framework. Users will be able to use parameterized templates, create their own combination of Google Cloud Platform primitives and share them.
2016-03-24 17:38 Conner Forrest zdnet.com.feedsportal.com
41 Weak links in the blockchain: We're neglecting the foundations Security and Privacy: New Challenges As big data, the IoT, and social media spread their wings, they bring new challenges to information security and user privacy. In the rush to make bigger and grander claims for the disruptive potential of blockchain, too many commentators are neglecting the foundations. If they think blockchain is important, then it's all the more important they understand what it does well, and what it just doesn't do at all. Business journalists are supposed to be skeptical about technology, but many have apparently taken leave of their critical faculties, even talking up blockchain as a "trust machine". You don't need to be a cryptographer to understand the essence of blockchain, you just have to be cautious with magic words like "open" and "decentralised", and that old saw, "trust". What do they really mean? Blockchain does things that not all applications really need, and it doesn't do what many apps do need, like access control and confidentiality. Didn't we learn from PKI that technology doesn't confer trust? It's been claimed that putting land titles on the blockchain will prevent government corruption. To which I say, please heed Bruce Schneier, who said only amateurs hack computers; professional criminals hack people.
2016-03-24 17:33 Steve Wilson zdnet.com.feedsportal.com
42 Cloud plus artificial intelligence is creating The Matrix (and that's a good thing) The matrix might not turn out to be so bad after all. The Matrix is coming, but it might not look quite how you might expect. This combination of technologies, the LEF believes, will mark a major new phase of innovation which it has dubbed 'The Matrix' in a nod to the cyberpunk films released across the late 90s and early 2000s. In essence, the Leading Edge Forum suggests "an ever more capable digital ecosystem" is increasingly underlying business infrastructure, helping organisations to radically transform not only their business, but society in a way which will only get stronger over time as consumer expectations rise. "For many years, AI advances stemmed mostly from academic investigations and the expert system initiatives of large organizations, but progress is now driven by the consumer marketplace. Virtually every type of human intelligence is becoming the basis of a scalable, cloud-based, global business model. This is greatly accelerating AI/MI innovation -- creating huge new opportunities and potentially disruptive industry scenarios," says report author and LEF research director, David Moschella. And while the Matrix of of the movies was a pretty grim experience, this version is quite the opposite. "The rollout of the Matrix is the biggest economic initiative of our time, and those firms and individuals that embrace these changes will enjoy exciting opportunities, while those who resist will increasingly fall behind," the report warns. Moschella argues that we've already gotten to the point where AI is helping in everyday situations - and we're becoming dependent on it - whether we realise it or not. "Today, we often don't feel the extent of these changes because once a function can be done by computers - be it making calculations, Googling queries, playing Go , identifying a song, or recognizing a face - it no longer seems like artificial intelligence (AI). But it is," he says. "We are surrounded by, and dependent upon, software and algorithmic control in countless ways, and these changes have only just begun," Moschella adds. And just as the internet has become a fundamental part of life - at least in the developed world - the LEF believes that this also represents the future of cloud computing technology, or indeed, it's present. "While the cloud metaphor suggests something 'out there,' we are all now part of a vast and increasingly intelligent matrix of systems, software, data, algorithms and individual activity," says Moschella. "Whether the Matrix catches on as industry terminology or not,", he continues, "it captures the key technology dynamic of our time: the extraordinary merger of machine intelligence and cloud economics, and all that this will entail," he adds.
2016-03-24 17:10 Danny Palmer zdnet.com.feedsportal.com
43 How to make Facebook private: Secure your Facebook profile to keep prying eyes at bay Facebook is the biggest and best-known social network, but that doesn’t mean its users don’t need to keep their wits about them. Here’s how to secure your Facebook account and protect your privacy on Facebook. Also see: Best Facebook tips & tricks. If you’re going to share intimate details of your life on Facebook, it’s important to consider who can see what you’re posting and, also, if you’re potentially sharing a personal detail too far. Follow our tips to below to make sure your Facebook account is secure from threats of all shapes and forms. The best way to see what you’re publically sharing is to put yourself in the public’s shoes. Go to your profile page, tap the three dots icon on your cover photo and choose View as. By default you will see your Facebook profile as seen by a random member of the public with whom you’re not friends, but you can also click ‘View as specific person’ if there is a certain friend for whom you have limited your posts (see below). If you’re not happy with what you see, follow the tips below to secure your Facebook profile. It’s also worth checking out Facebook Privacy Basics for a real beginner’s step-by-step guide to Facebook security. DON’T ACCEPT ALL FRIEND REQUESTS: If you don’t know them, don’t add them. Simple. It’s worth going through your friends list every so often and weeding out all the randoms - who knows how they got there. KEEP AN EYE ON THE KIDS: Facebook has an age limit of 13 years, but it’s easy to get around and even 13-year-olds need protecting online. If you have a young child using Facebook, check that they know who they are talking to, that those people really are who they say they are, and that what they are saying is appropriate - cyberbullies, pedos and groomers are not something you want your child to experience. CONSIDER WHAT YOU POST: Have you ever read someone’s posts every day on Facebook but walked past them in the street and not even acknowledged them? If the answer to that question is not yes then you’re in the minority. Not everyone who views your profile is your friend, and not all can be trusted with your most intimate personal details. One that really bugs us is the airport check-in posts. We might well be jealous that you’re off to soak up the sun for a week, but we won’t be jealous when you return to find your home ransacked and your irreplaceable personal belongings gone. SHARE POSTS PRIVATELY: Ensure your profile is locked down so that only approved friends see what you share. To do so, open Facebook and click on the downward triangle at the top right corner of the page and choose Settings. Under the privacy tab you’ll find an option for who can see your future posts. Click Edit and choose Friends, or choose More Options to select a custom list. (Certainly do not choose Public, and you should choose Only Me only if you wish to be a loner. In which case Facebook might not be the best place for you.) This is a global setting, but you can also specify who can see individual posts. Before you hit Post on a new status, click the drop-down to the left of the Post button and again choose Friends or select More Options to specify a custom list. SECURE OLD FACEBOOK POSTS: That takes care of future posts, but what about those you shared before you became concerned about Facebook privacy? Still in Settings, Privacy, Who can see my stuff is an option to ‘Limit the audience for posts you’ve shared with friends of friends or public?’ Set this to ‘Limit Old Posts’. SECURE POSTS YOU’RE TAGGED IN: Facebook is a social network, which means it’s not all about what you do but also what your friends do. And they can tag you in all sorts of stuff that will be visible to all on your profile and in the News feed - if you let them. Open Settings, Timeline and Tagging and carefully check each option here. You can control who can post on your timeline, who can see posts you’ve been tagged in and even set Facebook to gain your approval before the tag is applied. HIDE YOUR PHONE NUMBER ON FACEBOOK: Facebook mobile nags and nags until you add your phone number to the service, but you don’t necessarily want that information to be visible to all who view your profile. Open the drop-down for Who can look you up using the phone number you provided under Settings Privacy, Who can look me up. You can do the same for your email address above, and below you can specify whether your Facebook profile should be listed by search engines such as Google. BLOCK PEOPLE ON FACEBOOK: Having followed the above steps your Facebook profile will be reasonably secure from people not in your friends list. But it’s the ones you don’t get on with who could become an issue. To block a Facebook member from being able to see your profile, go to Settings, Blocking and add their name under Block users. Click Block to save the change. If it’s a friend who you’ve decided is no longer a particularly good friend you want to block, go to their profile and tap the three dots icon on their cover photo. Choose Block. RESTRICT WHAT FRIENDS SEE ON FACEBOOK: There is a middle ground between your best friends or acquaintances and your enemies, of course. For instance: your boss. You can’t reasonably reject his friend request, but you don’t want him to see what you get up to on a Friday night. Go to Settings, Blocking and choose Edit List next to Restricted List. Add their name here and they will see only what you publically share (which is hopefully not very much). HIDE YOUR BIRTHDAY AND OTHER PERSONAL DETAILS ON FACEBOOK: If you’re using the desktop version of Facebook, click the padlock with three lines icon to the left of the downward arrow at the top right of the page. Select Privacy Check-up. The first two steps will take you through limiting who can see your posts and which apps have access to your account. The third option lets you hide certain elements of your personal information, such as your birthday or birth year from your profile. If there’s something here you don’t want anyone to see, tap on the drop-down and choose Only Me. You can also access these settings from the About tab on your profile page. STOP PEOPLE ADDING YOU ON FACEBOOK: If you get a lot of randoms trying to add you on Facebook, you can set Facebook to allow only the people who may have a genuine link to you from adding you. In Settings, Privacy, Who can contact me is an option for ‘Who can send me friend requests?’ By default this will be set to Everyone, but you can change this to Friends of friends only using the drop-down menu. If they don’t know any of the people you know, they won’t be able to add you. SPECIFY WHICH APPS CAN POST TO FACEBOOK: Every time you like a game or service on Facebook it is added to your apps list, and some of these apps may have been unwittingly granted permission to post to your profile whenever they like without first requiring your approval. Go to Settings, Apps and have a browse through the apps listed here. Underneath each app is information about who they can share information with. I set all mine to Only Me, since I find apps and games that post your achievements an annoyance, especially when they clog up the News feed, but you can also choose Public, Friends, Friends of Friends or Custom. In this pop-up window you can also see what information is shared with the app - if you’re not happy, hover the mouse cursor over the app and click the X to remove it. PROTECT YOUR FACEBOOK FROM HACKERS: Forget about what people can see on your profile for a moment. Consider that with the correct knowledge they could directly access your account and make posts on your behalf, read your private messages and even lock you out of your account. Facebook has a whole section of its Settings menu devoted to this - you’ll find it in Settings, Security. Here you’ll be able to do such things as approve only certain apps and browsers from accessing your profile (in other words those on your own phone or PC), get a notification when someone logs into your account, use your phone as an extra layer of security and more. If you ever have any reason to suspect someone has access to your account, change your password. You can do this in Settings, General. Be sure to use a strong password that won’t be easily guessed. PROTECT YOUR FACEBOOK FROM ADVERTISERS: Facebook is a free service, but increasingly makes money from adverts displayed on the site. Targetted advertising is that which looks at your activity, likes and history in order to serve up ads most likely to appeal to you. In many ways that’s a good thing, but some people just don’t like advertisers having access to so much information about them. Open Settings, Adverts and study the options here. You can choose to allow or deny targetted advertising, and also stipulate whether your friends can see adverts about things you appear to endorse. If you’ve done all this and still aren’t satisfied, the best way to go off the Facebook radar is to delete your account . Read next: Facebook Messenger isn’t evil and it isn’t about to spy on you Follow Marie Brewis on Twitter
2016-03-24 17:04 Marie Brewis www.pcadvisor.co.uk
44 Starbucks finally launching an app for Windows phones, banks are coming back too While I know the main app discussed in this article may not matter to many readers, it's been one of those apps that other mobile platforms have had for years that has been missing on Windows Phone. I visit Starbucks in Seattle once or twice a week and having the app on my phone is convenient and one of the main reasons I choose to visit this coffee establishment. All 36,000 New York City police officers will pack Windows Phones The NYPD started a pilot program with Windows Phones in late 2014 and this week announced that all 36,000 officers will be issued the handsets to help solve crimes. The Microsoft Band, see my full review of the Band 2 , has had a Starbucks app since it first launched, but we have only seen limited third party apps on Windows phones. GeekWire reports that Starbucks president and chief operating officer, Kevin Johnson, revealed at the Starbucks shareholder meeting yesterday that a Starbucks Windows phone app was coming in 30 to 45 days. Mr. Johnson is a former Microsoft executive so maybe that is what it took to finally get one Seattle company to support another Seattle company in the mobile space. There are third party Windows phone apps for Starbucks, but they have limitations and cannot match the functionality seen on iOS and Android Starbucks apps. Hopefully, this new Windows phone app will come with all the capability expected in an official Starbucks app. While we are finally going to see Starbucks on Windows phone, we are also now seeing the return of banks to the platform. Banks have been some of the most prominent businesses to drop Windows phone support over the past couple of years, but as I continue my Microsoft March madness test I am seeing the return of banks via Windows 10 universal app support. I now have access to USAA and American Express on my Nokia Lumia 830 and understand Bank of America will return to the platform next week. The promise of universal apps supporting phones, tablets, and PCs is starting to be realized which is great for those using Microsoft mobile products. Bring on a Surface phone later this year and I may just go all in with Microsoft for my mobile needs.
2016-03-24 16:49 Matthew Miller zdnet.com.feedsportal.com
45 This is how you'll play Pokemon Go More details about Pokemon Go have been released, including some new screenshots, giving us a better idea of how the game will work. Details so far have been scarce, and just when we thought Niantic was about to spill the beans at GDC, it cancelled its talk. But today the Pokemon Company has revealed some more information about Go, which will combine the real world with the virtual to make you feel like a true Pokemon master. To start with the basics, all the action will take place on your phone, which will vibrate to alert you when you're near a wild Pokemon. You'll then see the Pokemon on your smartphone screen, and throw a Poke ball to catch it - but there's no guarantee you'll snag it before it gets away. As in the adventure games, some Pokemon will only appear in certain locations - water Pokemon by the sea, for example. Hopefully we won't have to break into any power plants to capture Zapdos this time around. There will also be PokeStops, located at "interesting places, such as public art installations, historical markers, and monuments" where you'll be able to get new Poke Balls and other items. You'll also be able to get Pokemon eggs, which will hatch once you've walked enough distance. The more Pokemon you catch, the more levels you'll climb, making more powerful Pokemon and items available to you. Once you've caught a Pokemon species enough times times you'll be able to evolve them. But as any expert Pokemon player will know, it's not all about the catching. We're told that, later in the game, you'll be asked to join one of three teams. With your team you'll be able to take claim to Gyms, or take them from other teams by battling the Pokemon you've caught. It all sounds quite similar to Niantic Labs's existing smartphone game Ingress, in which players also fight to control territories. Pokemon Go still has us incredibly interested, but there's no word on release date yet, or any word on how in-app purchases will work. The Pokemon Company says that a selection of people in Japan will get to test Go out early, but there's no word on when that will be. You can read the entire post by The Pokemon Company here. Article continues below
2016-03-24 16:21 By Hugh feedproxy.google.com
46 Watch Machete slay these delicious tacos -- in 360 degrees Have you ever dreamed of eating tacos with Machete? You might never be able to, but if you have a smartphone, you might be able to get as close to the experience as possible. WARNING: You will want to rush out to the nearest taquería. Ready, set... chomp, chomp!
2016-03-24 18:35 Laura Martínez cnet.com.feedsportal.com
47 47 How IoT, Cloud Create Actionable Insights for Microsoft Customers Microsoft's mission is to empower everyone to achieve more, and two of the most transformative trends affecting business today are the Internet of things (IoT) and big data. Today's enterprises rely on a constellation of mobile devices, software as a service and billions of connected "things" outputting astonishing quantities of data. By connecting devices and assets they already own, enterprises not only capture rich data, but also harvest the raw material that cloud-powered machine learning, perceptual intelligence and analytics distill into valuable insights to transform their business. Microsoft offers the infrastructure for uncovering those valuable insights and making them actionable. Aiming to help companies make better decisions faster, Microsoft put years of research into its Cortana Analytics and Azure IoT suites. With Microsoft's Build conference coming up next week in San Francisco, this eWEEK slide show highlights six Microsoft customers and illustrates how connecting devices and assets they already had with IoT and the cloud unlock new actionable insights, forecasts and trends from their data.
2016-03-24 18:05 Darryl K www.eweek.com
48 Prompted by media reports of acquisition talks, Apple officials confirmed there had been discussions, but that there are no plans to buy Imagination. Apple officials have had discussions with troubled chip maker Imagination Technologies about a possible acquisition, but nothing came of the talks and Apple has no immediate plans to make a bid. The statement released this week by Apple to the British Stock Market came after earlier media reports based on unnamed sources indicated that was in "advanced talks" to buy Imagination in hopes of acquiring the chip maker's PowerVR GPU technology. Apple has used the technology in its ARM-based mobile A-Series systems-on-a- chip (SoCs), and also is an investor in Imagination, holding about an 8.5 percent stake. The reports gave Imagination's stock price a significant boost, which apparently prompted Apple to issue its statement March 22. Imagination is based in the UK. "From time to time, Apple talks with companies about potential acquisitions," company officials said in the brief statement. "We had some discussions with Imagination, but we do not plan to make an offer for the company at this time. " Apple builds its own CPU cores and uses Imagination's GPU in many of its chips. Imagination is heavily dependent on Apple's iPhone and iPad businesses, and has been hurt in recent months by the slowing sales of the smartphone. The company has had disappointing financial results in recent quarters and has seen its stock price slip, prompting officials in February to announce a significant restructuring. The restructuring included the resignation of Hossein Yassaie after 18 years as the company's CEO, and at the time officials also announced plans to lay off 150 employees. Earlier this month, Imagination officials said they wanted to accelerate their plans, including cutting another 200 jobs. The chip maker also will sell or shut down non-core units as part of the larger effort to save almost $40 million in expenses by the end of its next fiscal year, which runs through April 2017. Officials also the company will focus on three core businesses: PowerVR GPUs, MIPS for compute processing and Ensigma for connectivity. Imagination will not reduce investment or headcount in any of those areas, they said. Over that past several years, Imagination tried to reduce its reliance on the Apple products by expanding into growth areas like wearable devices and data center systems. In 2012, the company paid $100 million for the MIPS processor technology.
2016-03-24 18:05 Jeffrey Burt www.eweek.com
49 Computerworld UK Daily Digest - 24 March 2016 - Useful online devops training courses - Google’s Eric Schmidt on machine learning - What is the future for a CIO? Google's exec chairman wants to support big ideas for big problems Clear Returns beat over 400 other EU start-ups in the Tech All Stars competition With Google's Schmidt and Yahoo's Mayer, FWD.us is focused on immigration, education.
2016-03-24 16:00 Christina Mercer www.computerworlduk.com
50 How to turn iOS into Android: Give your iPhone an Android makeover using Andrios The iPhone is arguably one of the most popular smartphones on the market, with more and more Android users deciding to make the switch to iOS. However, as we all know, iOS and Android are two completely different operating systems that look and perform completely differently, and the change may be difficult for Android users. However, we’ve found a way for iPhone users to turn iOS into Android complete with lock screen widgets, a redesigned notification center and of course, the Android back button. Read next: How to download YouTube videos on an iPhone or iPad So, how can you turn iOS into Android? While there is no way of officially (or unofficially for that matter) load the Android operating system onto an iOS device, but there is something you can do to sprinkle Android-y goodness on your iPhone. It’s called Andrios, a jailbreak tweak that was launched back in May 2015 to quite a bit of hype. Why? Because it essentially turns your iPhone into an Android device complete with Lockscreen widgets, a redesigned Notification Centre and more. You can still access all your iOS apps and features though, as Andrios is only a ‘theme’ essentially and all the inner workings of iOS are still present. So, what’s so good about Andrios? For a starter, it brings the Android notification center to iOS complete with toggles to important settings like Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, Volume, Airplane mode, etc. while also redesigning the volume slider menu to contain a music bar, search bar, and volume controller. It also offers the Android Action Bar containing back, home and app switcher buttons for the ultimate Android experience. Users can switch to the previously used app by tapping on the back button while the middle (home) button offers a software equivalent of Apple’s home button, returning users to the main iOS interface. The app switcher button will, of course, take you to the app switching menu, and holding the button will clear all open apps. Andrios also offers the ability to add widgets to your iOS lock screen, although we’re not quite sure where the widgets would come from as no iOS app will officially provide lock screen widgets. So, how do you get this theme and apply it to your iPhone? Carry on reading to find out. Before we go any further we should mention that as Andrios is a jailbreak tweak, it may not be 100 percent bug-free as unlike with the App Store, apps don’t need approval before being listed. Read next: How to root an Android device Step 1) The first step is to jailbreak your iPhone, which isn’t the easiest thing to do – especially as there is no current jailbreak for iOS 9.3 (although one has been teased so fingers crossed!). This means that unless your phone is already jailbroken or you’re running a version of iOS that can be jailbroken, you’re out of luck. For more information on jailbreaking, take a look at our sister site Macworld UK’s ultimate ‘how to jailbreak’ guide. Step 2) The next step is to open Cydia (the jailbroken App Store) and search for the tweak discussed above, Andrios. Once you’ve found the tweak, buy it (It’s up for $3.99 at the time of writing) and wait for it to be downloaded. Depending on your setup this may require Winterboard, a theme app for jailbroken devices. Step 3) Once Andrios has been installed, your iPhone will automatically respring and the effect should be applied. If it hasn’t been automatically applied, head to the Winterboard app, select the Andrios theme and apply it. Your iPhone should again respring and the theme should then be applied. Read next: How to use Facebook Reactions
2016-03-24 15:55 Lewis Painter www.pcadvisor.co.uk
51 LG Watch Urbane 2nd Edition LTE launching on AT&T and Verizon LG launched the LG Watch Urbane 2nd Edition just before the 2015 holiday season, but after a week the cellular Android Wear smartwatch was pulled from stores due to an undisclosed hardware issue. Apparently, the hardware issues have been fixed as LG just announced the LG Watch Urbane 2nd Edition LTE is now available for preorder from AT&T and Verizon. It seems the distinction between these two is that the new model has LTE in the name. Wearables: An emerging trend with staying power Wearable tech, from Google Glass to Fitbit, Jawbone and other devices, is garnering plenty of attention. Here’s what lies ahead for the industry. The LG Watch Urbane 2nd Edition LTE is the first Android Wear smartwatch with an integrated cellular radio, similar to what we see in the Samsung Gear S2 3G. Having the capability for the watch to serve as a stand-alone device is rare in the wearable space and the new Watch Urbane LTE looks to be a very attractive option for the business person who needs to always stay connected. The new Watch Urbane LTE has a hypoallergenic elastomer band and 348ppi P-OLED display. LG's Android Wear devices have always had fabulous displays and its the same here on the new watch. The Watch Urbane 2nd Edition LTE has the following specs: It's available on Verizon for $449.99 with a two-year contract or $499.99 without a contract. The cost to add to an existing plan is $5/month. Buyers can also get $100 off the watch with a LG G5 or LG V10 purchase and two-year activation. AT&T customers can purchase the new LG Watch Urbane 2nd Edition LTE for a full retail price of $359.99, $199.99 with a two-year contract, or for $99.99 with a two-year agreement when you buy a LG G5 on AT&T Next. The watch data fee is $10/month. AT&T supports NumberSync so one phone number can be used for your phone and your watch.
2016-03-24 15:54 Matthew Miller zdnet.com.feedsportal.com
52 13 best budget displays 2016 UK: What's the best budget PC monitor you can buy in the UK? If you haven’t treated yourself to a new monitor in a while, then now is the perfect time to do so. Great image quality is available at affordable prices, while monitors are slimmer and lighter than ever before. Here we’ve picked a few impressive displays, all of which are available for under £200. They offer a variety of features to suit every need whether you’re working on spreadsheets, gaming or looking for an all-round multimedia experience. Also see: Best displays All the displays reviewed here are roughly the same size, with most measuring 24in along the diagonal. Other sizes are, of course, available, so you can adjust your purchase to suit both your pocket and the size of your desk. Also see: All display reviews With the size nailed down, you’ll then need to think about what you really want from your monitor. It may be that all you care about is looks. Thankfully, most modern displays are a great deal better looking than older models, with a greater design emphasis on lifestyle and fitting in with your home décor. In many cases, that thick surrounding bezel has been removed in favour of a tidy, nearly frameless design and modern backlight technology allows for much slimmer, neater displays. This is also handy if you want a multi-monitor setup, where the gaps between the displays will be as thin as possible. Some models, such as those reviewed here from Asus and Philips are available in different colours, which can make a dramatic difference to the look of your worktop. Being budget displays, all of the monitors in this group feature basic tilting stands, although the degree of tilt available does vary. You’ll also have to often do without expensive options such as USB hubs or card readers. More important to many is the performance of the display itself, and perhaps the biggest deciding factor here will be your choice of panel technology – and it boils down to twisted- nematic (TN) panels versus everything else. A TN panel costs less to make and can produce some decent performance results in terms of contrast ratio and the super-fast response times craved by serious gamers. They are, however, let down by restricted viewing angles, which means the brightness and colour of the picture can appear to shift if not viewed straight on. Any movement of your head is likely to make this apparent. All the non-TN panels in this round-up use in-plane switching (IPS) or Plane-line switching (PLS) panels, which typically offer a vastly superior viewing experience and are better suited for general-purpose use. An IPS/PLS screen is often favoured by photo- or video-editors, as they offer better colour accuracy. The monitors reviewed here all offer at least two inputs, and this will determine what sort of equipment you can hook up to your monitor. Most of them support the ageing VGA connector, which should be avoided if at all possible, and supplement it with a digital input, such as DVI, HDMI and DisplayPort. Multiple inputs allow you to connect more than one device at a time and switch between them using the monitor’s control buttons – you may want to connect your laptop and a gaming console or a Blu-ray player without having to unplug cables each time. The most useful connector on monitors of this type is either DisplayPort or HDMI, as they combine digital picture information with digital audio – allowing you to connect up both sound and vision with a single cable. DisplayPort is becoming more common on both Macs and Windows PCs, although you’re less likely to find such a connector on home AV equipment. The DVI connector provides a high-quality digital video input, but doesn’t carry sound. With the right cables and adaptors, all three digital connectors can be used interchangeably in most cases, at least for video. If you have an Android phone or tablet, look for an HDMI port with MHL support, which allows you to hook it up to your big screen while simultaneously charging the device. For casual listening and system alerts, it can be useful to have built-in speakers. Don’t expect good sound quality, though. More useful is a headphone socket that will allow you to listen to sound coming in via the HDMI or DisplayPort inputs. All the monitors in this group test offer the standard ‘full-HD’ resolution of 1920x1080 pixels, which offers a good balance of detail and readability at this size, while delivering the maximum image detail from HD sources such as Blu-ray discs. This 16:9 widescreen aspect ratio is better suited to watching film and television, but 16:10 and 4:3 designed for PC use are harder to find today. We evaluate monitor performance using a combination of objective measurements and subjective assessments. We use a Datacolor Spyder5Elite (older reviews were tested through the Spyder 4) calibrator to set up and test each monitor. This device measures the brightness of the display as well as the accuracy of the colours reproduced. By viewing a variety of test material, we can determine such factors as the sharpness of text and the natural appearance of skin tones. We also look for undesirable features such as “banding” in areas which should appear smoothly shaded and missing or stuck pixels. We also check for any ghosting of moving images, check for any noticeable input lag and try to evaluate the real-world response time which particularly applies if you're a gamer. Next, we take a look at the build quality and ergonomics of each display. Checking the adjustability of the stand, accessibility of controls and connectors and the ease of use of the on- screen-display (OSD) menu system. If there are speakers included we’ll also give them a listen. The monitors here have a range of prices and features to suit everyone. Although there’s a big difference in quality between the TN displays and those featuring IPS/PLS panels, all of them offer quality good enough for general use. It might come as a surprise to some, but we found the IPS/PLS panels to really stand out in their colour reproduction and accuracy. However, there were a few TN panels, such as the one found in the BenQ RL2460HT which left us extremely impressed by its all-round screen performance and design. If you want to go down the TN route and you're a serious gamer the AOC G2460VQ6 and ViewSonic VX2457-mhd offer great all-round capabilities at a cheaper price over the BenQ RL2460HT. If you're more of a hardcore gamer and want a budget panel which can offer a cool 144Hz refresh rate, the Acer Predator GN246HLBbid is a worthy option, but does lack colour accuracy and depth. In our comparison there were a few IPS/PLS panels which stood out due to their colour reproduction and viewing angles, notably the Philips 246E7QDSW which has a beautifully designed stand and white-coloured design, making it look elegant in a home or work environment. There are also some of us that like to run multi-monitor display setups and this is where the Asus VN247H shines through its low-profile bezel design. Note: All ratings are based on their respective review dates The VX2542mh performs well for a TN monitor and offers flexible input options, including HDMI, along with built-in speakers. However, at £145 it's hard to justify the price in the face of excellent less expensive options. Read our ViewSonic VX2452mh review . The striking white finish of the Asus VX239H-W may appeal to many, especially if you'd like to use it in a kitchen or against a white wall. Its slim casing is solidly constructed and offers unique touch-sensitive controls. Image quality is among the best on offer, but the price is rather high for its performance. Read our Asus VX239H-W review . The BenQ GL2450 features a cheap TN panel with restricted viewing angles and offers no audio support. However it has a large screen size, a fast response time, solid build-quality and excellent value for money if all you need is a basic display. Read our BenQ GL2450 review . While the BenQ EW2740L isn't priced or pitched as a top-end monitor, for the budget price its performance is remarkably good. If your requirements are more stringent the figures represent something of a mixed bag. Photographers will be drawn by the good gamut and the colour accuracy and, while the contrast ratio could be better, this should fit the bill for less demanding users. Meanwhile, the response time is rather poor for serious gamers. If you're just looking for a 27in monitor for general-purpose use, you could do a lot worse. Read our BenQ EW2740L review . The NEC MultiSync E243WMi could prove ideal as a high-quality monitor you can run all day without adding to your electric bills. The display is neat and accurate, well-built and functional. Read our NEC MultiSync E243WMi review . The Philips 235E5 is a promising monitor let down by poor contrast performance. Otherwise, it's a very smart-looking display with excellent colour reproduction and great connectivity options made available at a very competitive price. Read our Philips 234E5 review . The AOC i2369Vm is an excellent entry-level 23in monitor. It's well built, offers a sleek frameless design and delivers superb picture quality straight out of the box which can't be matched by any other display in this group test. It also offers the widest range of inputs and comes with a decent warranty Read our AOC i2369Vm review. The Asus VN247H is a monitor which can handle games with ease and has a fantastic thin- bezel design that's good for a multi-monitor setup. However, its colour accuracy and stand do count against it. Read our Asus VN247H review . The Philips 246E7QDSW is aimed at anyone wanting an image with accurate colours, and it does a decent job. It's also well designed and is aesthetically pleasing to look at. And while it isn't designed with gamers in mind, other monitors offer similar colour accuracy with faster response times - if not the wide viewing angles of the 246E7QDSW. Read our Philips 246E7QDSW review . The GN246HLBbid may have a fast refresh rate, but the relatively high price, unimpressive colour accuracy and limited viewing angles mean it isn't great value. Read our Acer GN246HLBbid review . The VX2457-mhd can handle games with ease, especially if you have an AMD-enabled FreeSync graphics card. We were pleasantly surprised by its good colour accuracy, but viewing angles aren't great. However, the low price goes some way to making up for this. Read our ViewSonic VX2457-mhd review . The AOC G2460VQ6 is a great budget gaming monitor, which is mainly aimed at those with AMD cards. We were also impressed by the image quality at this price, and its styling setd it apart from other budget monitors. Read our AOC G2460VQ6 review . The BenQ RL2460HT is great gaming monitor which also doubles as a fantastic monitor for editing photos or videos, since it has good gamut and accurate colour reproduction. The HDMI output makes it a great choice for those who take gaming seriously and want to record their exploits. Read our BenQ RL2460HT review .
2016-03-24 15:39 Christopher Minasians www.pcadvisor.co.uk
53 Best security cameras for home use 2016: monitor your home from your phone, record video and get motion alerts with these connected cameras Everyone likes to know that their home is secure and that everything and everyone is safe while we’re gone. In years past, that meant using a CCTV system to record, but few had remote access or alerts. The alternative was an IP camera which required a computer science degree to install and configure for access over the internet, and therefore few people bought them. These days servers and the ‘cloud’ are used to make it simple to set up a camera and view its video feed from anywhere in the world. You also benefit from cloud storage with some cameras, so any evidence is save online and is safe from thieves who might steal your camera. To help you choose the best security camera, we’ll explain the key features to consider. Whether you’re looking for an easy way to check on your children and pets, or a motion detection system for intruders, you’ll find the right camera for your needs. Most home security cameras perform the same basic functions – they detect an event, record the event and send you an alert – but they don’t all do it in the same way. Certain cameras go beyond those basics and some can be mounted outdoors. Don’t forget to read our reviews to find out how each camera works in practice and whether its day and night video quality is good or not: don’t rely on a manufacturers specifications or claims. Alerts: You should get notifications on your smartphone when your camera detect events. Without watching the live feed constantly, this is the only way to keep tabs on your home in relative real time. Depending on the camera, it may send text alerts when it detects motion, sound, a face (known or unrecognised), or all three. Some can send alerts to multiple people, usually anyone else in the household using that product’s app; others will send emails in addition to text messages as a fail-safe in the event you can’t access your mobile device. Cloud recording: Many manufacturers now offer cloud storage plans with their camera. They record video to a server in the cloud and store it for 24 hours to a couple of weeks. Sometimes offered free, these cloud plans typically require a monthly subscription, but may be worth it both for their convenience and if you want constant 24/7 recording. Some subscription services record video only when motion is detected and they're not infallible and may miss an event. With 24/7 recording, like CCTV systems, you can rewind and watch any point in time (back the limit of your subscription). Bear in mind that some cameras - Nest in particular - only allows recording if you subscribe. If you don't you can't record anything and you'll get only alerts. Facial recognition: Netatmo is the only manufacturer we know which offers facial recognition. It does work, but not as well as you might hope. It can also take a long while before the camera can accurately identify people. It's used to alert you when specific people are home - useful for keeping tabs on kids - and also avoiding unnecessary alerts as it can warn you only when an unknown person is seen. Local storage: Some cameras include memory card slots so you can store video on the device. We like this option as it can eliminate the cost of monthly storage fees. The downside (if there isn’t any cloud storage option) is that if a thief steals your camera, he takes the video evidence with it. Apps: All the lat est cameras can be accessed (some even set up) via a smartphone or tablet app. In addition to offering a way to view the camera’s live feed, apps often let you adjust settings and turn on and off recording, motion detection and more. Often you'll only be able to customise notifications, adjust motion and sound detection sensitivity, and set detection areas via the web portal, but it's great if you can do this in the app. Motion detection: Motion detection is one of the most desirable features in a security camera. Built-in sensors pick up movement within the camera’s field of view and trigger video recording. Because these sensors are sensitive to any movement – event a shift in lighting or leaves blowing outside a window – it’s important the system also offers the ability to narrow the range of detection, adjust the sensor’s sensitivity or otherwise customise this feature to cut down on false alerts. Some don't offer this and, generally, should be avoided. Night vision: Most burglaries happen after dark, so this feature is nearly as important as motion detection. Technically, most home security cameras support infrared LED illumination, versus true night vision based on image intensification or thermal vision. Some camera’s will switch to night vision automatically in low-light conditions, while others allow you to customise when and how it should be activated. This won't work through windows, as you'll just see a reflection of the infrared LEDs. Pan Tilt Swivel : Most security cameras – including all those reviewed here – can be manually tilted and swivelled to focus on a certain viewing area, but this is a purely set?it-and-forget it feature. A true pan/tilt camera is equipped with a motor so that you can move its lens – or even follow a moving object if you’re watching a live feed – using its app or browser-based app. Resolution: No amount of security video will help you if it’s blurry, jittery or otherwise distorted. Look for a camera that offers the highest possible resolution. Most currently offer 720p (often referred to as ‘high definition’ or HD), but some newer cameras are coming out with 1080p (often referred to as ‘full HD’). Keep in mind higher resolution cameras use more internet and Wi-Fi bandwidth and battery life. Many cameras also offer a software zoom feature (which is not the same thing as having a physical zoom lens). Scheduling: Scheduling features allow you to tell the camera to turn on and off, detect motion, and/or send alerts at specified times. This is useful when you, for example, only want to be notified when your children get home from school or just want to monitor your home when you’re away. It also reduces the amount of false alerts. Two-way audio: While the idea of a security camera implies eyes-on monitoring, the ability to also hear what’s going on gives you a more complete picture of what’s happening on the home front when you’re away. It can also alert you to something occurring out of the camera’s field of vision. This feature can also allow you to speak through the camera, a great tool for remotely commanding an unruly pet or startling an intruder in the act, but be aware that you might need to plug in a powered speaker for this feature to work. Viewing angle: The camera’s field of view determines how much it can see. As you’re probably monitoring a single room, you want a wide viewing angle. Most current cameras fall in the 130- degree range. These wide angles can sometimes cause image distortion at the edges in the form of a fish-eye effect, particularly when used in smaller rooms, but it’s not like you’re going to use a security to capture snapshots for your photo album. Web client: Many cameras can be accessed through a web browser as well. This is handy when you don’t have access to your phone or a wireless connection. The web app should closely mirror its mobile counterpart, so you don’t need to learn a whole new set of controls. It may even offer extra features, such as the ability to download video clips. There are some great apps which let you re-purpose that old iPhone or Android phone which would otherwise just sit in a drawer unused. One of the best is Manything, which is free for iOS and Android (it's in beta on Android - only a small number of devices are supported). We tested out Manything over a couple of weeks using an iPhone 5 and it ran flawlessly. The setup process is amazingly quick and simple: install the app and create a free account with an email address and password. Then, install the app on your main phone and you'll be able to log in and view a live video feed using your old phone's camera. Manything offers a lot of the features described above, including the ability to select an area to monitor for motion, and it will send you an alert when motion is detected so you can check the feed to see what's going on. Clips of the motion are automatically recorded and saved to the cloud and you can download these on your phone for safekeeping. There's a free subscription option which lets you use one phone and keeps motion recordings for four hours. But if you pay a small monthly fee, you can get a longer video history (including continuous recording) and use more phones to get extra video feeds. The app is brilliantly designed - the companies below could learn a thing or two about making a decent security camera app from Manything. There are two disadvantages, though. First, your phone isn't going to have infrared LEDs for night vision, so the system is only useful during the day or if you leave a light on at night. Second, video is recorded at only 480x360 pixels so while it's enough to see what's happening, it may not be enough to recognise an intruder or make out text on the side of a van or its registration plate. The Home Cam 100 is relatively cheap, but without the subscription it's little more than a webcam. And even with it, you don't get continuous recording and you can't set an area for motion detection. The app is dated and needs a redesign, and ideally more features. BT also needs to rethink its subscription and offer alternative recording options so owners can take advantage of existing cloud storage they already pay for. Read our BT Home Cam 100 review . The UCam247-HDO1080 is a big step forward, both in usability and video quality. Because of this, the relatively high price is easy to justify and will be well worth the investment if it, for example, catches a thief in the act. It might be overkill for keeping tabs on your pets, but to protect an expensive possession such as a car, it’s ideal. Read our UCam247-HDO1080 review . At £199, the Welcome is relatively expensive. But unlike the new Nest Cam, it doesn’t require a subscription so you won’t have any on-going costs. In our experience the facial recognition was about 70 percent accurate, which isn’t ideal. At least the app lets you configure exactly when you get notifications and you can reassure family members that it won’t record clips of them if they don’t want it to. In this respect, it’s smarter than other cameras which record motion without discrimination and don’t have the same privacy features. It won’t prevent someone breaking in to your home as new systems such as MyFox aim to do, but if you’re only bothered about general motion detection there are cheaper options such as the Nest Cam at £159. But if the face recognition and privacy options appeal, it’s by no means bad value. Read our Netatmo Welcome review . So, what do we think of the MyFox home alarm and security camera? In terms of design, it’s by far the best-looking system we’ve seen, with sleek curves and a beautiful aluminium and white theme. It provides you with a holistic, smart home security system that you can continue to add to over time. The camera is clear even when using night vision and the Intellitag is the best break-in detector we’ve used, but for a combined price of £418 plus £3.99/£7.99 a month for cloud services, we think it’s slightly on the expensive side. Read our Myfox Home Alarm and Security Camera review . The big question is ‘is the Piper nv worth the money?’ and in a word, yes, it is. The first generation Piper classic was a good entry into the home automation/home security industry, but it was lacking in several areas, mainly with regards to the camera capabilities. Piper went away, addressed those issues and what the Piper nv presents is a holistic way to both secure and automate your home. The camera quality is great, even when streamed over 4G, the night vision delivers a clear picture and it does what it says on the tin. Apart from a few teething problems, we haven’t had any issues with Piper nv in the time that we’ve been testing it. Read our Piper nv review . Overall I was impressed with the Canary. The camera itself looks good and it allowed me to monitor a large room in my home with a single unit which was sensitive to both movement and unusual sounds. Setting the hardware up could not have been easier, and the app is well designed and incredibly easy to use. The Apple Watch app was also very useful for notifications, as well as allowing me to arm and disarm the Canary. The HomeHealth feature is a bonus, and not typically found in a security camera, so that's a handy extra which makes the Canary better value. I'd like to see the free cloud storage extended to 24 hours, as 12 hours isn't really enough. For anyone after a security camera and like the extras of the siren and air quality measurements, the Canary is a great choice. Best of all, the device has only alerted me to genuine situations that require my attention and appears to have the right balance between privacy and security. The only thing I would suggest for the next device would be that footage is made available to me on my laptop or desktop. Read our Canary review . The Nest Cam is a well-made piece of hardware that delivers great video, even in the dark. However, the apps and website need a better interface for navigating the timeline and the iOS app needs more features, such as the ability to view your marked video clips, and a way to save videos locally or share them online. In order to be a proper security camera, alerts need to be addressed too. Given that other brands will save a seven-day video history for free, the Nest Cam is fairly poor value. And we’d like to see the option to use your own local storage – perhaps a NAS – to record footage if you don’t want to subscribe. Read our Nest Cam review . As a package, the HomeMonitor is the best we've seen to date. Image quality could be better (the range needs a 1080p camera), but it's the ease of setup and clearly laid out apps and website which makes it so good. The Nest Cam has better image quality, but the app is flakey and playback performance isn't as good. Plus, Nest Aware costs quite a lot per month for the subscription, without which there's no recording at all. The HomeMonitor cameras are far from the cheapest around, with no subscription costs, they are still good value. The indoor version - the HomeMonitor HDS - is available on Amazon for just £109. That really is money well spent. Read our Y-cam HomeMonitor HD Pro review .
2016-03-24 15:37 Jim Martin www.pcadvisor.co.uk
54 850 million Android devices still at risk of hijack by Stagefright bug Hundreds of millions of devices are still at risk from Stagefright Over 850 million Android devices are still potentially at threat from the notorious Stagefright vulnerability, leaving large swathes of smartphones and tablets at risk from hijacking via malware injections. Stagefight first came to light last year after it was discovered by Zimperium researcher Joshua Drake and the bug was dubbed one of the "worst Android vulnerabilities discovered to date" . The vulnerability is capable of attacking any Android device running Android 2.2 or higher and allows attackers to hijack of a device without the user even being aware. It does so just by taking advantage of Android's built-in media library, which can be triggered to run malicious code capable of giving the hacker access to all the user's files. Google has continuously released patches, updates and other fixes since the severity of the vulnerability came to light, but writing in a blog post titled ' Reflecting on Stagefright Patches ', researchers at Zimperium have warned that hundreds of millions of smartphones and tablets running the Android operating system still remain vulnerable to the security flaw. In total, the mobile security firm believes between 600 million and 857 million of the estimated 1.4 billion to 2 billion Android devices in the world still remain vulnerable. The figures are based on an analysis of Android devices, 43 percent of which were deemed to still be vulnerable to bug CVE-2015-3864, despite updates by Google. Part of the problem, researchers claim, stems from how vendors are shipping updates designed to patch Stagefright, but in fact then expose users to other strains of the vulnerability. Sony, Motorola, Samsung, Asus, LG and Huawei have all inadvertently made this error, potentially increasing the potential for users to be attacked, rather than decreasing it. Zimperium also raise concerns over new Stagefight vulnerabilities - such as Metaphor, which was discovered earlier this month - which are slow to get patched because only a small number of devices receive an update at any one time. Google is looking to fix this issue with the introduction of Android N, but zLabs researchers point out "it will take a few years before the entire ecosystem will be running Android N+". There's also the issue of updates not being applied to older Android devices, incapable of running newer versions of the OS, which means they'll remain vulnerable to attack as they're unable to receive patches. Devices also remain unpatched due to the fragmented nature of the Android ecosystem in which a large number of handset providers operate. Whilst Google remains committed to releasing monthly updates to ensure protection against Stagefright, vendors can be slow to approve and implement the upgrades, leaving their users wide open to becoming victims. The firm also advises carriers and instant messaging vendors to "to be prepared to block SMS messages with links in the event that a worm begins spreading".
2016-03-24 15:31 Danny Palmer zdnet.com.feedsportal.com
55 Uber accused of changing scope of bug bounties to avoid payouts BLACK CAB NEMESIS Uber has created a new bunch of enemies after hackers accused the firm of moving the goal posts on a recently launched bug bounty programme to avoid paying for discoveries. Uber launched a bug bounty programme earlier this week, promising payouts as high as $10,000 for critical vulnerabilities. However, in the few days since launch the company has apparently started changing the scope of how it rates bugs, seemingly to avoid paying out. Top rated HackerOne community hacker Sean Melia tweeted that he had seen this happen after submitting a bug: reported a bunch of admin panels/ports to @Uber . all marked as informative. then noticed they silently changed their scope page. not cool. — Sean Melia (@seanmeals) March 23, 2016 Do not report publicly accessible login panels to @uber they do not pay for them. @Hacker0x01 -heres some microsites pic.twitter.com/gVwEId0aat — Sean Melia (@seanmeals) March 24, 2016 Some questioned whether Melia had found bugs that really warranted a reward, but he, somewhat understandably, pointed out that if what he found was considered within the scope of the bug bounty programme at the time of submission a payout should be forthcoming. @jstnkndy @Uber @ethicalhack3r when a company states they will pay for a certain type of bug. I will report it if I find it. — Sean Melia (@seanmeals) March 24, 2016 Another hacker with the monkier 'theethicalhacker' took to Reddit to report a similar case . "I reported a xss bug and this is the conversation screenshot Imgur. They ultimately closed my bug and reopened it STATING it was a new valid bug, then closed it again. They validated it was a bug and swindled me out of a payout," they wrote. "A billion dollar company refuses to pay for valid bugs. We are asking for fair treatment for the security work we do and no-one is holding Uber's feet to the fire. " In response Uber said that while it thanked the research for the findings they were low severity and did not impact its overall security. “This researcher found, as he said himself, a collection of low severity issues. Our bug bounty program financially rewards submissions that have a security impact to our system. But we always welcome researchers sharing any findings and we thank him for his work.” Whoever consider themselves in the right, the incidents will join the growing list of gripes white hat hackers have with bug bounty programmes, such as low payouts, refusal to acknowledge discoveries and fixing bugs without issuing rewards. µ
2016-03-24 15:30 Dan Worth www.theinquirer.net
56 How Uncharted, Killzone and Crash Bandicoot could be great on phones Sony is finally entering the world of mobile gaming - and it's about time! Sony has now confirmed the formation of a new company called ForwardWorks, in Japan, which will have a big focus on mobile gaming titles. Not much else is know about the new company, but a press release claims it will cater to "users with opportunity to casually enjoy full-fledged game titles in the new field of the smart device market". What isn't clear is whether the company will have the license to use existing Sony Computer Entertainment published titles. If it does, that could mean Nathan Drake, Ratchet, Clank, Sackboy, Knack, even Spike from Ape Escape could all appear on your phone in the future. But phones aren't as capable as your PlayStation 4, so how could franchises be re-imagined for your iOS or Android device? Here are a few of our own ideas. Let's start with the obvious - the Uncharted series. Nathan Drake has been on three PlayStation 3 adventures as well as two on PlayStation Vita and a huge remastered collection for PlayStation 4, plus he's about to set out on one final journey in Uncharted 4. Yet still, the character hasn't been featured on mobile. Imagine an endless runner with one of the Uncharted characters main characters in the hot seat. Top-end phone graphics, temples collapsing around you, tension building as you have to speed up, a large variety of locations and that special Uncharted dialogue could combine to make the first truly good endless runner. One of the best elements of Uncharted are the set pieces, so bringing those in could put other games like Temple Run to shame by embracing the simple mechanic and still having a true flavor of character. Throw in Sully and Elena as unlockable characters too. Mobile would give Naughty Dog another excuse for more Jak & Daxter games. One of the strongest elements of the entire series was the puzzle solving, paired with the wittily written script. Creating a The Room-style puzzle adventure would work great with these characters popping up throughout. Bring back these two iconic characters with newly written dialogue and a mass of new puzzles to get through. The harder the puzzles the better, plus this would be a great way of reintroducing the characters to gamers before the inevitable PlayStation 4 reboot. Journey is one of the best gaming experiences we've ever gad, and the whole thing only takes around two hours to complete. The game lets you connect up with a random player online and go on your adventure together, wandering through the beautiful landscapes, collecting items and working together to find your way. If that's not something developer That Game Company wants to do, maybe we can get a brand new journey to go through. A second game could include a series of new areas to explore and put an even bigger focus on the multiplayer elements. Phones are at the point where they can run this level of games - why would you want to play this on a console? Crash Bandicoot made one of the best racing spin off games either, so let's get that onto mobile. With the success of mobile racing games such as Asphalt 8, it feels like a no-brainer for Sony to make a racing game you can play on your phone. Forget about the serious Gran Turismo franchise and all your "serious" racers, Crash Bandicoot is where it's at. Nintendo might be moving into mobile, but we don't expect to see a Mario Kart game on our smartphones any time soon. Crash would be a nice substitute. Remember Buzz! on the PlayStation 2? Despite its ridiculous main character and marketing material, it proved to be a fun party game that we can see translating well to the phone. QuizUp is doing the quiz thing right now for mobile, but the option to play as a group of friends rather than just 1-on-1 would make Buzz! an easy success on the phone. Just be sure to include a vast variety of topics and the ability to make your own customer quizzes, and we reckon we've got a winner. First-person shooters do not work on mobile due to touchscreens - so how do you bring a franchise like Killzone to your phone? Real-time-strategy might be the way to go here. There aren't enough RTS games on mobile considering how well the touchscreen input works for it. Playing the general in Killzone and commanding your troops to head out and battle the Helghast directly - deciding what soldiers to train, where to place them, and how to make your attack - could make for an interesting take on the series. Article continues below
2016-03-24 15:14 By James feedproxy.google.com
57 Brazil sees new low in tablet sales Last year saw the sharpest decline in sales of tablet computers in Brazil ever since the devices were introduced to the local market in 2010, according to research published by analyst IDC. Some 5,8 million units were sold last year, a 38 percent decline in relation to 2014. Out of the devices sold, 98,8 percent were traditional tablets, while 1,2 percent were notebooks with a detachable screen. A tablet world away: Where Samsung and Apple lose out to brands you've never heard of Small companies focused on offering low-priced devices are managing to turn the tables on the giants of the tech world. Here's how they do it. The decrease means Brazil is no longer the fourth largest tablet market in the world - from the 4,1 percent global share it previously had in 2014, the country is now placed ninth, with 2,8 percent of all tablet sales worldwide, according to the analyst. As for 2016, IDC Brazil predicts there will be a drop in tablet sales of 29 percent. "Tablets are no longer a novelty - and given the economic instability the country has experienced during all of last year, with rising unemployment and lower consumer confidence, they have became a superfluous item," says IDC Brazil analyst Pedro Hagge. After tablets were introduced in Brazil in 2010, sales soared a couple of years later as the device was seen as a cheaper and easier to use alternative to entry-level consumers. However, the dollar hike in relation to the Brazilian currency, the real, prompted foreign brands to leave the market and therefore the high street offering has dwindled. According to the analyst, another factor that has impacted tablet sales in Brazil is the cannibalization by smartphones with larger screens, the phablets, on offer at lower prices. Tablet prices have also seen a slight increase: in 2015 the average price for a device to Brazilian consumers was R$448 ($121) while in 2014, tablets were on offer for R$440 ($119) on average, so a 1.8 percent hike.
2016-03-24 15:12 Angelica Mari zdnet.com.feedsportal.com
58 How to take better photos on your iPhone: tips, tricks, apps and accessories for improving your iPhone photos and videos These days, I tend to use my iPhone way more than my DSLR for photos and videos because it's always to hand. It takes good photos and videos but there's always room for improvement and extra creativity. Here are some tips on how to make sure you end up with images that are far better than mere snaps, as well as videos that look less amateur. See also: Best apps for improving your photos Smartphone cameras are getting better and better, but no matter how many megapixels manufacturers cram in you have one fixed lens to play with. Only a couple of smartphones have zoom lenses, such as the Samsung Galaxy K Zoom, but what if you want a zoom on your iPhone? The good news is that you can buy lenses which clip over your iPhone. They include wide-angle, macro, fisheye and telephoto. You can even get miniature circular polarisers, so it’s possible to get many of the effects you can on a ‘proper’ camera without resorting to cheating in software. Olloclip makes lenses for all iPhone models, including the 6S and 6S Plus. They’re not the cheapest, but as with DSLRs, you get what you pay for. We’ve found Olloclip’s lenses to be very well built and produce extremely sharp photos. If you can afford to spend even more, Schneider's iPro Lens system is better still. Olloclip's iPhone 6 and 6 Plus 4-in-1 Lens is reversible and works with both the front- and rear- facing cameras, so you can use the wide-angle lens to take a ‘grouphie’ without needing a selfie stick. When you unscrew the wide-angle or fisheye lenses, there’s a macro lens underneath offering 10x and 15x magnification. It costs less than £65 from Amazon and works with the 6 and 6S, 6 Plus and 6S Plus. There's also the Olloclip Active Lens which has ultra-wide and telephoto lenses. It costs £89.99 from Amazon . Here's the difference between the ultra-wide and telephoto lenses (note that the edges of the image are quite soft - one of the disadvantages of using lens attachments): If you don't want to have to remove your iPhone from its case to attach a lens, you can buy the Ollocase in several colours for £24.99 from Amazon , or only £16.99 if you buy it with the lens system. It's available for both the iPhone 6/6S, and 6/6S Plus. The latest from Olloclip is the Studio, which comprises a bulkier version of the Ollocase and several attachments which allow you to mount it on a tripod. You also get two cold shoes, which make it possible to attach a light and mic to improve your videos. It's available for the 6/6S and 6/6S Plus for £80 from Olloclip. Olloclip isn’t the only choice, of course. If you have 35mm lenses, you can even buy adaptors to mount those lenses on your iPhone. One example is the Turtleback DOF and another is Photojojo’s (although this works only with the iPhone 4 and 4S). Mounting a 35mm lens isn’t simple and requires a special case for your iPhone. It’s not for everyone, but if you really want to shoot SLR-like photos, this is how to do it without faking depth of field. If you just want to take better macro photos and you're on a budget, try the Magnif-eye which costs just £4.99. The results aren't as good as Olloclip's macro lenses (the area in sharp focus is much smaller), but it costs a fraction of the price: If you have an iPhone 5S or newer you can shoot slo-mo video which can produce stunning results. It’s not too hard to hold the phone still for such a short amount of time, but the new time- lapse mode (first introduced in iOS 8) means the phone really needs to be mounted on a tripod to avoid shaky footage. You could try and rest your phone against something, but it’s worth investing in a case which can attach to a standard tripod or an iPhone-specific stand. An example is the Kenu Stance which costs £12.50 from Amazon and clips into the Lightning port and allows you to hold your iPhone steady in portrait or landscape mode. A balljoint means you can adjust it to the perfect angle for a time-lapse of clouds rushing overhead, or whatever it is you want to capture. In fact, a stand is also handy for photos, especially if you want to use the built-in camera app's self-timer. There are plenty of stands to choose between, including more universal ones, such as the Joby GripTight XL, at around £15. For time-lapse videos, the Muvi X-Lapse is a great gadget. It costs £15 from Amazon and turns slowly to capture a sweeping video panorama. It takes 15 minutes to turn 90 degrees, but you can set it to rotate up to 360 degrees over an hour. The only downside is that you can't adjust the speed. Sticking with Apple’s own camera app will limit your creativity. It’s a lot better than it used to be, but there are other camera apps such as Camera+ which offer more control. For example, you can choose separate focus and exposure points, focus manually and even choose the exact shutter speed. It can be helpful if you want to get more creative. For example, if you want to get that ‘smooth water’ effect when shooting a river or waterfall, you can combine a stand to keep the iPhone perfectly still with a slow shutter speed and some exposure compensation. Once you've taken photos (even in the stock camera app) Camera+ can import them and you get a vast range of enhancements including the excellent Clarity filter which brings out the detail in the photo. It's well worth £1.49. It's been around for years, but is still the best. You can read our full Camera+ review. If you want to improve your selfies, CyberLink's YouCam Perfect is fun, letting you do some virtual cosmetic surgery and smooth out those wrinkles and blemishes. For video, try Filmic Pro. This brilliant app gives you the kind of full manual control that you’d find on an enthusiast-level HD camcorder. All for £5.49. You’ll be able to vary the framerate (up top 240fps on the 6 and 6s), focus manually, change exposure, ISO, tint and more. It has audio meters, support for stereo mics, and you can shoot in a variety of aspect ratios including ‘Cinemascope’ 2.59:1.
2016-03-24 15:10 Jim Martin www.pcadvisor.co.uk
59 Guiding Eyes moves to IBM Cloud to continue mission of serving the blind A person who is blind is ultimately putting his or her life in the hands of a service dog. That is why the nonprofit organization Guiding Eyes for the Blind has a mission to put the right dog with the right person. In order to find that perfect dog, there are both structured and unstructured data that need to be sifted through. For better data management and to increase the graduation rates of its service dogs, Guiding Eyes announced today that it will use IBM Cloud. The move will also allow Guiding Eyes faster access to its canine data. (Related: Machine learning covered by the RSA Conference ) Guiding Eyes started the process of moving to the cloud two years ago by identifying that its legacy systems were aging and that it needed new servers to host all its data. Realizing it wasn’t in the business of hosting an IT department in-house anymore, the organization turned to IBM Cloud solutions, said president and CEO of Guiding Eyes Thomas Panek. IBM Cloud has allowed Guiding Eyes to migrate more than half a million health records and more than 65,000 temperament records on thousands of dogs. IBM Cloud will enable Guiding Eyes to provide easier access to colleagues across the United States, as well as partners and scientists who contribute to research and analysis of that data. Grading dogs Panek said that every dog that the organization graduates has a behavior checklist for everything it has done since it was born. Additionally, there is information on canine genetics research, breeding technology, behavioral development, and medical records and complex genetic mapping. There is also unstructured data from virtually scanned hard-copy questionnaires that trainers and host families complete about their experiences with the dogs. All of that data is being used to figure out which dog will be able to graduate and then serve someone. “The heavy-lifting that my staff has been doing is making sure that, as we migrate that data to IBM Cloud, that it’s the data we will really be able to use,” said Panek. “Much of this is normalizing tables and making sure what we are putting into the cloud is useful stuff, and it’s a chance to clean out the closet.”
2016-03-24 15:04 Madison Moore sdtimes.com
60 Microsoft is about to change Skype radically Microsoft has announced that it will soon release the preview version of the Skype Universal Windows Platform (UWP) app to Windows Insiders. Testers running Windows 10 PCs and tablets will be able to check out the new messaging app in the "coming weeks", Redmond says, so there's not long to wait now. The app won't immediately be usable on Windows 10 Mobile, but will follow for devices running that OS shortly. So what can you expect from the new Skype app? Microsoft says it has learned a lot of lessons from the feedback given following the release of the consumer preview of Skype Integration in Windows 10 last autumn – which has seen a number of complaints. One of the primary moans being the usability with larger screens on bigger tablets and hybrids, and desktop monitors, and of course that's a big part of what the Skype UWP app will tackle. Redmond promises a more streamlined interface all round, and a simplified look and feel for the app, with unnecessary menus and duplicated functions being stripped out. There has been a good deal of spring cleaning, basically, and the global menus are now in a new single settings menu, with contextual menus promised down the line. In the initial incarnation of this preview app, you'll be able to sign in with your Microsoft account, link a Skype ID, and then see your list of Skype contacts with the ability to initiate a chat, make one-to-one calls, send photos, and take part in existing group chats. Emoticons and emoji will be available, and users will also be able to see what the other person is typing in chats. So functionality will be fairly basic for this first release, although naturally enough, more features will arrive in subsequent versions. Microsoft says that the next couple of releases will introduce the ability to create groups and use group messaging, voice and video calling. You'll also be able to share your screen, as well as files and video messages. Another priority is making sure the app performs well and is responsive. As for the broader future of Skype, if you want to stick with the existing Skype app on Windows 10 you most certainly can for the foreseeable, but eventually everything will be integrated into the UWP app. But not before, Microsoft promises, the Skype UWP app becomes a high-quality and lightweight application with all features on-board. Article continues below
2016-03-24 15:00 By Darren feedproxy.google.com
61 Microsoft to reunify Skype calling, messaging, video in new Universal Windows 10 app After baffling a number of us Windows Skype users last year by replacing the unified Skype Windows client with three separate apps, Microsoft is getting the Skype band back together again. On March 24, Microsoft announced its latest Skype-related change of plans, which officials attributed to customer feedback. Microsoft now plans to release a version of its unified Skype Universal Windows Platform (UWP) app in preview form to Windows Insiders sometime soon, officials said. This app ultimately will replace the current unified Win32 Skype desktop application. (Microsoft officials aren't yet saying when the Win32 app will be phased out, though they do say this will happen in stages and only once the UWP app is solid.) I asked Microsoft officials whether the coming UWP Skype app would be available through the Store or be bundled with Windows 10. "The Skype UWP app will be available to consumers via the Windows Store as part of a future Windows 10 update," a spokesperson said. How to run Skype on a Chromebook No, Chromebooks can't yet run Skype natively. A Google tool to package Android apps for Chrome OS, however, is a handy workaround for Skype on your Chromebook. Microsoft still plans to continue to make the three separate Skype apps -- Messaging, Calling and Video -- available as standalone task-based apps for Windows 10 and Windows 10 Mobile users, at least for now. Previews of these three apps are integrated with (a k a bundled with) Windows 10 and Windows 10 Mobile. When I asked whether Microsoft planned to continue to deliver these separate Skype apps, moving forward, a spokesperson told me "The Skype team is continuing to gather feedback from users to guide how we evolve the experience for mobile. " "We've learned that the (use) of task-focused apps varies with screen size," said Barbie Stafford, Director of Product Marketing for Skype. "For small screens -- mobile users who have apps for each task -- integrated apps work really well. For laptops and desktops, the story is quite a bit different. " Microsoft does plan to allow Windows 10 Mobile users to also run the coming unified Skype UWP app at some point. Microsoft officials aren't yet saying when that will happen. Stafford said Microsoft's latest change in direction with Skype is about "research versus reality. " Microsoft announced in June 2015 the company's intentions to scrap its "Modern"/Universal/Windows Store version of Skype for Windows and replace it with three standalone Skype apps. Microsoft did continue to support the existing Win32 Skype desktop app on Windows 7, 8.x and 10, however (much to the relief of many of us desktop users who preferred the all-in-one integrated Skype experience). Microsoft execs also provided today some information about what will be in the coming UWP version of Skype for Windows 10. Some of the Version 1 features on the list: On the "still to come" list of features that will be in "the next couple of releases": The screen shot embedded in this post is of the new Skype UWP app which -- unsurprisingly, given the list of Version 1 features -- looks basically like the unified current Skype Win32 app.
2016-03-24 15:00 Mary Jo zdnet.com.feedsportal.com
62 Best tech deals of Easter deals week: Cheap TVs, tablets, headphones, speakers & more tech Amazon , Currys , Carphone Warehouse and other retailers have kicked off Easter deals week, and it's like Black Friday has come early. You can grab hundreds of tech bargains all week, with some promotions running until April. Here, we pick out the best of the tech deals available for Easter deals week to help you make sure that you don't miss out, including TV deals, tablet deals , headphone deals and much more. You can get access to deals 30 minutes early if you are an Amazon Prime member, and in most cases you'll get free next day delivery. You can sign up to the free trial of Amazon Prime here , or find out everything you need to know about Amazon Prime in our article: What is Amazon Prime? Save £30 on the HP Stream 11-r050sa 11.6in Laptop, now £149.99 at Currys. View deal here. There's also £50 off the HP Pavillion x360 13-s150sa 13.3in 2 in 1 laptop hybrid, now £549.99. View deal here. Another HP deal now, this time with a brilliant £250.99 off. You can get the HP ENVY 15.6in laptop for £449. View deal here. Get up to £200 off MacBooks at Currys. View deal here. Curry's is offering the Samsung UE48JU6445 Smart Ultra HD 4K 48in LED TV with £180 off, now £599. View deal here. Save £80 on the Panasonic Viera TX-39A300B 39in LED TV, now £219 at Currys. View deal here. You could also save £150 on the Samsung UE48JU6500 Smart Ultra HD 4K 48in Curved LED TV, now £699 at Currys. View deal here. LG 49UF680V Smart 4K Ultra HD 49in LED TV is £499 down from £200 at Currys. View deal here. Get the NOW TV HD Smart TV Box for just £14 at Currys, down from £24.99 and you'll get a 3 month Entertainment Pass. View deal here. There's a whopping £500 off on Samsung's SUHD UE55JS8000 Smart 3D Ultra HD 4K 55in LED TV, now £1,299. View deal here. The Acer Iconia One 10in Tablet with 16GB built-in memory has £20 off at Currys, now £99.99. View deal here. Get the iPad Air with £70 from John Lewis until 30 March. View deal here. Currys is also offering £70 on the iPad Air. View deal here. The Apple Watch has up to £120 off at Currys for Easter. View deal here. The Sony Smartwatch 3 has £50 off at Very. View deal here. Save more than £100 on the Asus Zenwatch at Very. View deal here. Best tablets | Best smartwatches | Best budget laptops | Best power banks | Best iPhone cases | Best activity trackers | Which Fitbit is best to buy? | Best games consoles | Best Samsung Galaxy S7 deals | Best SIM-only deals 2016
2016-03-24 15:00 Ashleigh Allsopp www.pcadvisor.co.uk
63 5 New Features In Intel's New NUC That Will Blow System Builders Away Mini PC Madness Intel took the wraps off its newest version of NUC, a "Next Unit of Computing" mini PC kit that system builders can use for digital signage, media centers and kiosks. The Intel NUC NUC6i7KYK features a unique case design with two lids -- users can pick a lid with a skull logo or one that is black -- and has support for third-party lids as well. According to Intel, Santa Clara, Calif., the NUC kit, code- named Skull Canyon, will start at $650. Intel system builder partners who currently sell NUC applauded the product's newest features, including better performance and graphics, as attractive to customers with intensive workloads and to enthusiasts. Following are five features in the new NUC that system builders found particularly impressive.
2016-03-24 14:55 Lindsey O www.crn.com
64 Hackers hit utility and water systems A NEW TYPE of hacker has emerged who might break into utilities like the water supply and spike them so as to poison a whole community. This is surely Hollywood stuff, or at least straight to DVD. But no, it is the real world and a warning from Verizon Security Solutions, which has found evidence of an actual attack where hackers got in and adulterated the water. Verizon's 2015 Data Breach Investigations digest (you will have to register to read it) said that the attack happened at a facility called Kemuri Water Company (KWC). This is a fake name to protect injured parties, presumably, and to allow the drinking of water to carry on. It is worth registering for the report if you are inclined to do that sort of thing. You can grab it as a PDF. It reckons that the incident was enabled by some hokey old issues. "Behind the scenes, KWC was a likely candidate for a data breach. Its internet- facing perimeter showed several high-risk vulnerabilities often exploited in the wild," said the report. "The OT end of the water district relied heavily on antiquated computer systems running operating systems from 10-plus years ago. Even more concerning, many critical IT and OT functions ran on a single AS400 system. KWC referred to this AS400 system as its SCADA platform. "This system functioned as a router with direct connections into several networks. Moreover, only a single employee was capable of administering it. If a data breach were to occur at KWC, this SCADA platform would be the first place to look. "Interviews with the KWC IT network team revealed concerns surrounding recent suspicious cyber activity. It became clear that KWC management was aware of potential unauthorised access into the OT systems of the water district. " The hackers were able to change the amount of chemicals in the water and alter its flow, according to the report. µ
2016-03-24 14:54 Dave Neal www.theinquirer.net
65 Google Updates: hands up, pay up, building down STARTING US off this week, let's bring out the bunting because Android Pay has launched in the UK! By which we mean it's been announced, not that you can actually use it. Heaven forbid. Most of the big banks are already signed up, with the exception of Barclays which says it currently has no plans. But that's what it said about Apple Pay. News is starting to reach us of plans for a YouTube rival to Periscope. Nothing is confirmed yet, but the live streaming app is said to be called YouTube Connect aimed at bridging the gap between the current Creator Studio gubbins and the likes of Facebook Live and Meerkat. Until we've got official from Google it's impossible to compare to Meerkat. Ahem. On the developer side, Google is opening up its speech recognition and Cloud Machine Learning APIs to anyone who wants to integrate them. So if you want to tell your phone to go fuck itself, you can not only shout it out, but the app will go away and teach itself exactly how. In Chrome news, the company is calling time on its app launcher. The add-on was designed so that Windows and Mac users could launch web apps as programs from the taskbar or ribbon. No-one did. It'll be gone in June. Once we've got Easter out of the way (and there's a massive Easter sale in the Google Play store by the way) we'll be on to April Fool's, and we know how much Google likes an April Fool. We'll track down the best ones here next week. One story we won't include, however, because it's true and we're telling you now, is the announcement from popular malware repository PornHub that it has started a virtual reality channel for users of Google Cardboard. Hey, we're not judging. And you knew it was going to happen eventually. One thing we would point out, however, is that Cardboard doesn't have a headstrap so it could be a two-handed process. What? We were all thinking it. Finally this week, Google Maps has led indirectly to someone having their house torn down. Not strictly true as the smoking wrecking ball had nowt to do with Google, but Nabors Demolition of Seagoville did manage to mistake 7601 Cousteau Drive for 7601 Calypso Drive because the dot was in the wrong place. It's a sad testament to the over-reliance on technology. Couldn't they have, you know, asked someone? We'll leave you to mull on that one till next week. µ
2016-03-24 14:43 Chris Merriman www.theinquirer.net
66 Aorus X5S v5 review The Aorus X5S v5 should have no business being this powerful while being so light and thin. At just 22.9mm, or under an inch thick, the updated notebook has an Nvidia GTX 980M graphics card hiding within its aluminum chassis, along with a 256GB solid-state drive (SSD) and a 1TB hard disk drive (HDD). There's no question it's a hardcore gaming machine, either. The Aorus X5S v5 has a ton of gaming-specific features beyond its powerful graphics capabilities and 15.6-inch 4K screen. On the far right of the full-sized keyboard are five programmable macro keys. There's even the option to add a dedicated hardware encoder, which relieves the strain of live streaming and recording gameplay from the CPU. As far as its contemporaries, the Aorus X5S v5 is on par with the Gigabyte P35X regarding the total package. For the most part, the P35X is evenly matched. In fact, they're almost identical, with the big exception being battery life. The 15-inch Aorus falls short of the monster that is the Acer Predator 15 in terms of pure performance, but has a 4K-resolution screen where the latter tops out at 1080p. High-performance laptops seem to be following the design examples set forth by high- performance automobiles, and the X5S v5 is no exception. Its smooth lines give way to sharp points and angular vents that would look like right at home on a Lamborghini. The black aluminum body is interrupted by several exhaust ports, which helps facilitate the necessary heavy cooling. The side vents also continue the super-car feel, and the vents in the rear leave no question that there's a lot going on under the hood. The lid comes to a slight point at its peak, with a small raised line running about an eighth of the way down. The Aorus logo, a hawkish sigil that would be right at home on war machines in a futuristic anime, lights up when the laptop is on and pluses when charging. When not powered up, however, the laptop logo is just as visible, thanks to being silver and a polished finish that reflects light like a mirror. The full-size keyboard has low, high and off backlighting settings. Programmable macro keys run in a vertical line to the left of the keyboard, with the top key highlighted in one of five colors, depending on which of the three sets of macros are in use. The keys themselves have a scissor-type mechanism with a nanometer-too-little travel to feel tactile/clicky. They're also pretty close together, to save space for the extra row of macro keys. Between the lack of satisfying travel and the tightness of the keys, I find my fingers tripping up more than usual when typing. Around the matte-finish screen is a substantial bezel. The sides and bottom of the screen are half an inch or so from the edge of the lid, while the lip up on top is a bit smaller. Just above the keyboard's number pad is the Aorus logo, which also acts as a light up power button. The touch pad also has a version of the Eagle insignia in low-contrast grey against the rest of the laptop's black aluminum. The black interior is fairly smudge resistant, but keep a microfiber cloth on hand to keep your laptop free from finger- and hand-prints. The review version I tested came with a microfiber cloth included, which is a welcome touch. Overall, this notebook looks 100% the part of a performance gaming laptop, and Aorus wants you to let everyone around you know it. There is no mistaking this laptop for a business class or casual machine – only gamers need apply. One jarring experience with the Aorus X5S v5 is using its proprietary software. The macros, performance gauges and command and control software all have a common theme that looks absolutely out of place among the smooth, clean lines of Windows 10. Instead of trying to match the overall feel of the OS, Aorus' software tries to match itself to the design of the laptop itself. The result is an unattractive user interface (UI) that sticks out and ends up looking cheap despite its usefulness.
2016-03-24 14:40 By Seth feedproxy.google.com
67 LifeBEAM nabs $16 million to expand AI-based wearable fitness tech Wearable fitness startup LifeBEAM has nabbed $16 million in venture financing to expand its product line for consumers. LifeBEAM was founded in 2011 by former Israeli air force pilots looking for new ways to monitor human physiology. The company first developed a sensor platform that could be integrated into fighter pilot and astronaut helmets in order to unobtrusively monitor health and performance. The tech was eventually picked up by NASA and the U. S. Air Force. Since then LifeBEAM has released several consumer-focused biometric monitoring gadgets based on its hardware and software platforms designed to track things like heart rate, blood flow and oxygen saturation. In 2013, LifeBEAM used crowdsourced funding platform IndieGogo to develop a sensor-laden bicycle helmut. The company also offers a sports cap that provides biorhythm collection for joggers by measuring heart rate, cadence and calories burned. LifeBEAM, which is now based New York City, with R&D centers in Israel, Los Angeles and Asia -- says its hardware, analytics and software technology have been used in wearable products from Samsung, Under Armour and Elbit Aerospace. According to LifeBEAM, the latest funding will be used to expand on a concept the company calls Awareables. It's an obvious play on words, but the company sees Awareables as a potentially new category of wearables that can deliver something akin to an AI-based personal fitness instructor to users of various wearable gadgets. "This is another significant milestone to help us fully accomplish our Awareable vision," said Omri Yoffe, co-founder & CEO of LifeBEAM. "Our new product is designed to provide consumers with the most personalized and insight-driven workout experiences. " LifeBEAM said the recent funding round was led by Squarepeg Capital with participation from Wellborn VC, Cerca Partners, Atomic14 VC, Triventures VC.
2016-03-24 14:39 Natalie Gagliordi zdnet.com.feedsportal.com
68 Google starts naming and shaming with certificate transparency report GOOGLE IS naming and shaming certificate authorities (CAs) that the company believes are not quite up to the security game. Google will show a list of certificates that ain't, or ain't yet, trusted by its browsers. This should inform security decisions to the positive. What it means essentially is that if a CA has slipped out of proper authority it will be ranked and listed in some sort of definitive way. "Today we are announcing a new certificate transparency [CT] log for a new set of root certificates: those that were once or are not yet trusted by browsers," said Martin Smith, software engineer for CT, in a Google Security Blog post . "CT data has a number of different uses, including protecting users from mis-issued certificates and providing webmasters and other interested parties with a public record of what certificates have been issued for domains. "Visibility of these CAs' activities is still useful, so we have created a new CT log for these certificates. This log will not be trusted by Chrome, and will provide a public record of certificates that are not accepted by the existing Google-operated logs. The new log is listed on our Known Logs page. " The firm explained that everyone is welcome to make use of the log to submit certificates and query data, and that it hopes the information will prove useful. However, Brian Spector, CEO at security firm MIRAC, believes that it will not be all that useful, and that it is an acknowledgement of the dangers of dodgy certificates. " As we have seen time and time again, any determined and well-funded attacker can keep trying the myriad commercial CAs until one with lax controls issues a legitimate code-signing certificate," he said. "It's great to see Google making such efforts to protect users. But despite their best intentions, this latest initiative is basically an attempt to patch a problem that can't be patched. "The problem is architectural. The best thing to do is start over with a new system which distributes trust across multiple points. If we do nothing, fake certificates will destroy the trust architecture on the internet and, once trust is gone, you can't get it back. " µ
2016-03-24 14:32 Dave Neal www.theinquirer.net
69 The 'Big Boys' Came To Play: HPE, Cisco Shake Up Hyper- Converged Landscape Cloud infrastructure rivals Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Cisco Systems launched new hyper-converged systems this month. HPE debuted Hyper Converged 380, while Cisco unveiled a new hyper-converged system and acquired CliQr technologies. Solution providers weighed in on how the landscape of the dynamic space will change as the large vendors enter the market. “Arguably, more competition’s better,” said Teklinks’ Dave Powell. “So you kind of had your Nutanix, SimpliVity, kind of playing in that [space]. Now the big boys are coming to that party because they realized that it was a space that they weren’t addressing. “Lots of times innovation is occurring when smaller guys are in that space,” Powell added. “So it will be interesting to see how people duke it out.” Rx Technology’s Mark Rizzo agreed that big vendors have no choice but to get involved in hyper-converged. “They’re losing share in other areas – they’ve got to start something,” he said. Randy Whipple of Randall Technology Services called hyper-converged a great solution for businesses like his. “It will help us do a better job providing products and services to our clients,” he said. TUC’s Marco Levecchia agreed that there is plenty of opportunity in hyper-converged to share. His focus is on trying to get more customers as excited about hyper-converged technologies as these big vendors have become. “I think it’s imperative for our customers to really start adopting all these new solutions and technologies. It’s imperative to their business but it’s also important to us. You know, we have a lot of stickiness with those products,” he said.
2016-03-24 14:22 Meghan Ottolini www.crn.com
70 AT&T Adds IoT Platform To Help Partners Realize Growing Mobility Opportunities Telecom heavyweight AT&T wants to help its partners take advantage of emerging opportunities around mobility. The carrier has introduced an Internet of Things platform that partners can use to create integrated solutions and manage IoT environments for their clients, while earning lucrative recurring revenue around the influx of connected devices. AT&T Partner Exchange providers now have access to AT&T Control Center, a cloud-based IoT platform that can help solution providers deploy, manage and scale IoT applications and devices connected to AT&T's 4G LTE network. Control Center is powered by software from Jasper Technologies, Inc., now part of Cisco. As more devices join the network, the need for mobility solutions isn't slowing down. According to the carrier, the number of solution providers selling mobility through Partner Exchange grew nearly 110 percent in 2015. [Related: AT&T To Partners: We Need Your Help With IoT ] Altaworx LLC., a solution provider and AT&T Platinum Partner, expects its IoT sales to more than double this year using Control Center, said Rickie Richey, CEO of Altaworx, based in Mobile, Ala. "Control Center has given us the ability to really grow our IoT business very rapidly. Once our IoT applications ship in June, the growth is going to be tremendous," Richey said. AT&T has had a heavy focus on mobility solutions, including IoT. Now, the carrier wants to empower partners in this emerging market, and help the channel capitalize on connected devices, said Sue Galvanek, vice president of the Partner Exchange program. "With the announcement of the IoT piece, we really have the full spectrum of mobility solutions," Galvanek said. "For an AT&T Partner Exchange solution provider, they can do resale of typical rate plans and devices, wireless WAN solutions, and now … we are letting them take advantage of our IoT connectivity [capabilities] to connect devices using Control Center to do it. " While many partners are still trying to learn about opportunities around IoT, some solution providers have already begun selling connectivity for IoT endpoints. The Control Center platform will help providers resell and build recurring revenue around IoT connectivity, she said. "Some partners are excited and ready to (do that), and others are thinking about what is possible. It's going to be an evolution, and it's going to take time to work through that and help [partners] understand where the value is and where the revenue growth opportunity is," Galvanek said. Altaworx specializes in hosted PBX, telecom expense management, and machine-to-machine products and services. The provider has been involved in the Control Center pilot program for the past 10 months and is selling connectivity to companies that develop IoT applications.
2016-03-24 14:19 Gina Narcisi www.crn.com
71 The ultimate tech logos quiz Do you know your Silicon Valley from your Silicon gel? Your Kaspersky's from your Skylakes? You might know all the names but do you know the logos of some of the world's most recognisable technology companies? If you managed to get all 20 right, you are a hawk- eyed, savvy technology maven and we salute you! Article continues below
2016-03-24 14:10 By SJ feedproxy.google.com
72 Now Microsoft Office 2016 can block macro malware attacks If employees attempt to follow an attacker's instructions and exit sandbox mode, they will now see a red-bar notification. With macro-based malware infections on the rise, Microsoft has launched a new Office 2016 feature that can help enterprise admins neuter the threat. Macros are disabled by default in Word, Excel and PowerPoint but attackers behind the banking malware Dridex and the more recent Locky ransomware have well-honed techniques to trick targets into enabling them, allowing malicious macros in email attachments to install malware on a PC. Microsoft says despite periodic lulls in macro- based malware infections over the past year, they're still increasing and that 98 percent of threats that target Office use malicious macros. The main risk from macros stems from human curiosity sparked by email with attractive subject headers. Microsoft noted in a report last year that, "It appears that users have become so accustomed to clicking the Enable content or similar warning bars in Microsoft Office products that they are now confident in being able to determine the perceived risk versus the potential gain. " The new "tactical" security feature in Office 2016 allows admins to set scenario-based rules that block macros and prevent users from enabling them in high-risk situations, such as when documents arrive from the internet. From Group Policy in Office 2016, admins can block macros for documents downloaded from cloud services such as Microsoft One, Google Drive and Dropbox. If the organization uses Outlook and Exchange for email, macros in attached documents from outside the business can also be blocked. Finally, macros can be blocked for documents from public shares, such as file-sharing sites. If an admin enables macro-blocking for all Office users, it will prevent users from exiting the Protected View sandbox when opening Word documents in Outlook. In Protected View, macros are disabled by default. If an employee attempts to follow an attacker's instructions and exit the sandbox mode, they will see a red-bar notification at the top of the document, stating that the administrator has blocked macros in this document. They also will not be able to exit Protected View. Microsoft notes that if the policy impacts scenarios where macros are legitimately used, staff would need to work with admins to find alternative workflows. Another enterprise security threat that Microsoft is addressing through Office is so-called CEO- spoofing, or business email compromise, which Snapchat and several other companies have fallen victim to in recent months.
2016-03-24 14:06 Liam Tung zdnet.com.feedsportal.com
73 Vevo's app update taps Spotify for music video recommendations, and more There's really only one name in music videos: Vevo. The company streams over 17 billion videos each month, and earlier this year, CEO Erik Huggers announced that it would soon launch a paid subscription model for those looking to dodge ads. With that, however, comes heightened expectations for how its product brings people onboard and continually improves. Vevo's Android (today) and iOS (within a week) apps are getting a bit of internal reworking that should make life a lot easier for new users. The onboarding process has been completely revamped with a goal to get users in and streaming more quickly. Perhaps more importantly, Vevo has also added social network connections so that you can "import and automatically add the artists you follow on Spotify, Twitter and YouTube to your favorites, resulting in a smarter feed, faster. " Jose Gonzalez, product manager at Vevo, told me that smart onboarding "will come to Apple TV in the next few months," while the social network connection feature "will be exclusive to mobile. " On initial boot, you simply select your favorite genres, which will "generate an initial list of recommended artists that are already tailored to your preferences. " From there, you pick a few favorite artists, then sift through a few playlists in order to anticipate what kind of tunes you're into. Given that it's building products from the ground-up, the company is "doubling product and engineering headcount this year," and that's in addition to the P&E talent it received through the acquisition of Showyou last year. When we asked Gonzalez about the preferred platform for onboarding, he had this to say: "We think mobile is the ideal platform. The lean-in experience lends itself well to scrolling through new artist suggestions. We customized Apple TV for a lean-back experience so you can onboard in a way that's optimized for the platform. And since the Apple TV app does sync with iOS and Android , anytime you add or modify your favorite artists on the mobile app, those changes will sync with Apple TV and you'll get to enjoy a smarter Spotlight feed that autoplays. " In related Vevo news, I was told that the company's homegrown artist graph "will continue to evolve as new playlists are created. " To boot, the company will soon replace Vevo TV, which is a linear, curated stream, with a "personalized stream. " Soon, you'll see improvements in Vevo's weekly discovery playlist (called New for You) as well as in browse functions that will make it easier to discover new artists and videos. And, of course, to see which videos are trending overall and within specific genres. Article continues below
2016-03-24 14:00 By Darren feedproxy.google.com
74 2016 Channel Madness Tournament Of Chiefs: Round 2 Matchup Breakdowns The Solutions 16 Last week, we kicked off the second-annual Channel Madness Tournament Of Chiefs by pitting 32 of the industry's most influential channel chiefs against one another in head-to-head battles. The objective: Gain enough support from partners and peers to best your opponent and move on to Round 2. So here we sit, with the field cut in half and several high- profile channel chief matchups now under way in Round 2 of the 2016 Channel Madness Tournament. Voting for Round 2 closes Tuesday, March 29, at noon ET. Before you cast your votes, get some insight into the Solutions 16 matchups here. 2016-03-24 13:38 CRN Staff www.crn.com
75 Does Apple think it's 'sad' that there are so many old iPads out there too? Philip Schiller, Apple's senior vice president of worldwide marketing, seems to have upset a lot of people by suggesting that it was "really sad" that there are 600 million PCs out there still in use. Well, I wonder what he thinks of all those old iPads out there? Just before the event where the iPhone SE and new iPad Pro was unveiled, Carolina Milanesi, chief of research and head of Kantar Worldpanel ComTech US Business, tweeted some interesting charts giving us a breakdown of the iPad market share in three different markets. Conclusion: there are a lot of old iPads out there. Let's just focus on the data for the US for now. It shows that 11 percent of the iPads that are in use are the original, first-generation iPad, which was released April 2010, while a further 25 percent are iPad 2 tablets, first released March 2011. Now, it's true that the iPad 2 wasn't discontinued until March 2014, but the fact that Apple dragged its lifespan out that long still doesn't change the fact that it's a pretty old device, based on old hardware, and one that has been struggling to run some of the latest incarnations of iOS. If regular consumers are perfectly happy with their aging iPads, and are clearly not interested in upgrading them, then how is this any different to aging PCs that are still in use? Now, it might have been a joke, but you know what they say about people in glass houses. Just as PC OEMs are finding it hard to convince people to upgrade old hardware, Apple is finding it equally hard to get people to upgrade their old iPads because their existing devices are "good enough. "
The question is not 'Can the iPad Pro replace 600 million PCs?' but 'Are businesses ready to replace Windows with iOS?' zdnet.com.feedsportal.com 2016-03-24 13:22 Adrian Kingsley zdnet.com.feedsportal.com
76 76 Citrix rolls out Secure Browser to lock down delivery of browser-based apps Citrix on Thursday rolled out a new family of browser products aimed at securing the delivery of browser-based apps. The software vendor says Secure Browser allows IT departments to ensure that both web and internally hosted applications can be delivered to employee devices with zero endpoint configuration or plugins. Instead, administrators pre-define the web browser and plugins required to access a web application, and end users can then access them via a URL. The app is delivered virtually to the user's preferred browser for an additional layer of security between the network and the employee's device. Citrix is offering Secure Browser as a fully hosted service starting at $20-per-user-per-month. Citrix XenApp users can access the product as a perpetual license for $150 per user or device. In January, Citrix announced the release of XenApp and XenDesktop 7.7 and 7.8, as well as new servicing options for the virtualization platforms. The releases focused on new cloud provisioning and collaboration optimizations between Citrix and Microsoft. Around the same time Citrix revealed that it sold off its two cloud infrastructure management products to Accelerite, which is owned by Persistent Systems. The primary products included CloudPlatform and CloudPortal Business Manager, both of which are based on open source CloudStack. The cloud sale stems from restructure plans Citrix first announced in November, including the spin off its GoTo business and affiliated products. Interim CEO Robert Calderoni said at the time that Citrix would unload businesses that were not directly linked to the company's enterprise unit, which includes XenApp, XenDesktop, XenMobile, ShareFile and NetScaler.
2016-03-24 13:08 Natalie Gagliordi zdnet.com.feedsportal.com
77 Microsoft and Samsung go deeper into the Internet of Things Microsoft and Samsung are looking to take their Internet of Things (IoT) strategies to new levels. Samsung will be hosting a developer conference in San Francisco next month, where it will unveil a new IoT real-time operating system. “It is estimated that there will be 20 million IoT devices by 2020 and, like in the early days of mobile phones, there is a proliferation of proprietary, competing operating systems from all the major vendors,” the company wrote in its conference session agenda . “This fragmentation will challenge developers who are trying to get their apps into the marketplace. In this session, Samsung will announce our new, open-source IoT real-time operating system (RTOS), which has a wide scope of features while maintaining a lightweight and efficient footprint.” (Related: How mobile testing works in an IoT world ) More details aren’t expected to be disclosed until the company’s conference next month, but the new operating system could potentially be used to power the company’s new and existing IoT solutions. Microsoft recently introduced its end-to-end IoT platform to developers. Azure IoT aims give enterprises the power to build and gain value from IoT solutions. To help developers get started, Azure IoT will provide a set of open-source SDKs, tools, and samples on GitHub. In addition, the company will be collaborating with the community and partners to provide new features; support new languages, protocols, devices and platforms; fix bugs; and improve performance. “Our IoT solutions, including Azure IoT Suite and Azure IoT Hub, harness the power of our full cloud, data and developer offerings for the enterprise to provide hyperscale IoT services, rich data and analytics, and deep integration,” wrote Olivier Bloch, senior program manager for Azure IoT, in a blog post . “Developers can start building custom solutions using IoT Hub or get started quickly with the comprehensive preconfigured solutions of Azure IoT Suite.”
2016-03-24 13:04 Christina Mulligan sdtimes.com
78 Intel Quietly Speeds Up Skylake-U: i7-6660U now in Price List Intel has quietly added a new Skylake-U processor into its price list. The new Intel Core i7- 6660U system-on-chip is designed for low-power notebook systems and provides higher performance than its direct predecessor, the Core i7-6650U, and sits on the top of Intel's 15W mobile CPU stack. The new Intel Core i7-6660U belongs to the Skylake-U family of processors that feature CPU and PCH on the same piece of substrate and are used to build mobile PCs with low power consumption. The new chip is currently only listed in Intel’s price list , which reveals its general specs (two cores with hyperthreading, 4 MB L3 cache and 2.40 GHz clock-rate, no word on turbo) as well as its price of $415 in 1000-unit quantities. The CPU costs the same amount of money as the Core i7-6650U and the Core i7- 6560U. If the Core i7-6660U chip shares general design with its predecessor, then it features two cores with Hyper-Threading technology clocked at 2.40 GHz (up 200 MHz from the i7-6650U ), 4 MB L3 cache, a dual-channel memory controller (support for DDR4-2133, LPDDR3-1866 and DDR3L-1600 memory), Intel Iris Graphics 540 (48 execution units with 64 MB eDRAM, up to 1.05 GHz clock rate, up to 806.4 GFLOPS compute performance) as well as a 15 W TDP. The new processor should also support all the technologies that other Skylake-generation mobile Core i7 chips support, including AES-NI, AVX 2, vPro, virtualization (VT-x, VT-d), software guard extensions (SGX), TSX-NI, MPX, Trusted Execution, Secure Key, SSE4.1/4.2 and so on. The quiet addition of the Core i7-6660U into the price list indicates that Intel is starting to gradually refresh its Skylake lineup of products. It is unclear whether the refresh is conditioned by the upcoming spring refresh cycle of PC makers or higher yields of chips produced using the 14 nm process technology. Nonetheless, the new CPU will help PC makers to differentiate their new offerings and speed up performance in certain applications. Source: Intel Price List via CPU-World .
2016-03-24 13:00 Anton Shilov www.anandtech.com
79 Overclockers 8Pack Asteroid review The latest machine from Stoke, UK-based PC builders Overclockers UK is a monster, but it's surprisingly small and affordable considering the other systems in the firm's famous 8Pack range. That's because this is one of the best gaming desktops in the world – but it's also a mini-ITX machine that's designed for LAN events. It even arrives in a customised flight case. The Asteroid is immediately stunning, and that's no surprise – this machine has been designed, built and tweaked in Ian "8Pack" Parry. He's a renowned overclocking expert who holds numerous world-records, and he works at Overclockers UK, developing the firm's high-end machines. We interviewed 8Pack last year to find out more about his PC building methods. He usually designs monster rigs that cost between $7,083 (about £5,000, AU$9,339) and $14,168 (about £10,000, AU$18,583). Starting at £3989.99 (around US$5,624 or AUS$7,509), the Asteroid is a departure – but Overclockers' master builder has amply risen to the challenge. It all starts with a customised Parvum Veer chassis. It's a mini-ITX case made entirely from acrylic, with layers of plastic in white, black and red deployed to match the Asteroid's colour scheme. The top of the machine serves up a window and an opaque view into the reservoir, which bubbles and swirls with red coolant when the Asteroid is activated. The front of the machine has angled inlays that show off the acrylic, and a slatted section shows the 8Pack-branded fans that function as an all-important air intake. It's a stunning start – and the Asteroid only gets better once its windowed side panel is removed. Four pipes filled with red coolant sit vertically, with a pair of pipes at the front and two shorter units at the back. The former pipes head upwards to the graphics card, which has been modified with a clear EK waterblock that's made from acrylic and nickel, while the latter tubes delve towards the processor and its solid black EK Supremacy EVO block. They're fed by a thick sheet of custom- made acrylic that functions as a second reservoir: coolant flows through its plastic recesses and around an 8Pack logo before heading upwards to the components. The extra acrylic layer means Overclockers can hide the EK CoolStream PE-series radiator beneath – and the rest of the cooling gear, along with the PSU, sits beneath a slab of black acrylic that functions as the motherboard tray. The entire machine sits on small feet that raise the case up, allowing air to reach the cooling hardware. The Asus motherboard sits vertically behind the cooling pipes, and matches the colour theme thanks to red-and-black heatsinks. The graphics card and motherboard power cables are individually braided with red, black and grey fibres, and the black case fans are covered with a red 8Pack logo. The entire interior is illuminated by a white strip-light, and the back has a smart plate of authenticity that's decorated with 8Pack's logo. There's no question about the design nous of this system. It's one of the smallest gaming PCs I've ever seen, but it's also one of the best-looking, with fantastic, attentive design and consistent colours. It's the kind of rig that'll draw admiring glances when it's unveiled at a LAN party. The design carries through to the outside, too: the Asteroid comes with its own 8Pack-branded flight case for transport to LAN events. 2016-03-24 13:00 By Mike feedproxy.google.com
80 How to optimise and organise iTunes Think for a minute about all the things that iTunes can do: it's a repository holding possibly many gigabytes of media, a library, a shop and an internal database, plus it has to stream and sync all that data wherever you choose. No wonder it can sometimes run out of puff! Part of the problem is that Apple loves loading up iTunes with amazing new features, many of which you don't need. Things have got even worse with users complaining of long lags – even on powerful machines – when switching songs or views. So what can you do to boost its performance? One of the best ways to stop iTunes slowing to a crawl is to take control of your Smart Playlists. It's easy to create dozens or even hundreds of these to wrangle your tracks in different ways, but they also force iTunes to work harder to maintain them all, especially if you choose to enable live updating. Now, obviously, you don't want to just delete all those useful Smart Playlists willy-nilly, but it helps if you can cut them down. Riding to the rescue is a Smart Playlist management app called Smarts from scripting wizard Doug Adams, which makes it easy to save, edit, export and (gasp) delete your Smart Playlists so iTunes works better. Read on to find out how. If iTunes is slow to open, try holding down the Option key as you launch the app. Click Choose Library…, select your existing iTunes folder and see if it speeds things up. This may be a clever feature, but the need to compare your playlists with millions of other iTunes users makes Genius a real resource hog. Make sure it stays disabled from the Store menu. This is another resource hog, so unless you're running iTunes as a server for the rest of your network, deactivate it in iTunes > Preferences > Sharing. Go to Preferences > Store and untick everything except 'Limit Ad Tracking' – doing so can significantly speed up sync operations. Smart playlists are a great way to manage music in your iTunes library. But managing them can be tricky, especially if you have so many that they force iTunes to a crawl. This is where Smarts comes in. Smarts is a free iTunes Smart Playlist manager from Doug Adams, the man behind iTunes AppleScripts. Smarts itself must be downloaded from the App Store, so go to it from the Apple menu and search for 'Smarts' – it should be the first entry. Open Smarts and confirm your iTunes media folder if necessary. You'll see two lists in its window: on the left, the Smart Playlists you have in iTunes; on the right, saved Smart Playlist templates, which are stored outside iTunes, so they can be used for backup or restoration. Before you delete any Smart Playlists, it's wise to back them up. Highlight one in the left-hand panel of Smarts, then click Save. Rename it if you wish, and add some notes to help you identify it in future if necessary, then hit OK. Do this for every Smart Playlist you wish to keep. Now you can purge iTunes of unwanted Smart Playlists, safe in the knowledge that you can restore them later. To do this from Smarts' left-hand panel, highlight a playlist, click Delete and then OK to confirm your decision. Repeat for each unwanted playlist until you're done. Your playlist sidebar will soon be much less cluttered. You should also notice a speed improvement each time you launch iTunes because it won't have to update all those Smart Playlists every time it starts up. If you change your mind, restoring a Smart Playlist is simple… Your saved Smart Playlists remain in the Saved Smart Templates pane. From here you can restore them: click the Load button, rename the playlist if necessary and click OK. iTunes should now automatically launch, so wait while Smarts updates the database with the restored playlist. You can also edit (or add) notes to a saved template – highlight the template and click Notes to review or make changes. Click Export to export the Smart Playlist as an XML file you can manually import into another copy of iTunes, or Delete to get rid of it permanently.
2016-03-24 12:49 By MacFormat feedproxy.google.com
81 Google announces intelligent cloud products, Java vulnerability affects Oracle products, and GNOME 3.20 Delhi released— news digest: March 24, 2016 At GCP Next, Google announced the latest results of work completed on the Google Cloud Platform. The next round of innovation builds on its portfolio of data-management and analytics capabilities by adding new products and services in areas like machine learning, open source and Big Data. Google introduced a new product family called Cloud Machine Learning, which the company said will take machine learning mainstream, and give data scientists and developers a way to build new kinds of intelligent applications. It provides the same technologies that power Google Now, Google Photos and voice recognition in Google Search as easy-to-use REST APIs. It enables developers to build powerful machine learning models on your data using the open-source TensorFlow machine learning library, according to Google’s blog. Google also announced the general availability of Cloud Dataproc, its managed Apache Hadoop and Apache Spark service, which include new features to BigQuery, the managed analytics data warehouse. Cloud Machine Learning also pushed some of its technologies to open source, including TensorFlow, which is the No. 1 machine learning project on GitHub, the company wrote. Java vulnerability affects Oracle products Oracle has disclosed a critical Java vulnerability. According to the security alert, CVE-2016- 0636 is a vulnerability affecting Java SE running in browsers on desktops. This vulnerability is not applicable to Java deployments, typically in servers or standalone desktop applications, that load and run only trusted code. This vulnerability does not affect Oracle server-based software. It may be remotely exploitable without authentication, and could be exploited over a network without the need for a user name and password. The products that are affected include Oracle Java SE 7 Update 97, and 8 Update 73 and 74 for Windows, Solaris, Linux, and Mac OS X. Successful exploits can impact the availability, integrity and confidentiality of the user’s system. Due to the severity of this vulnerability and the public disclosure of technical details, Oracle recommended that customers apply the updates provided by the security alert. Gnome 3.20 After six months of work by the GNOME community, version 3.20 has been released as the latest version since GNOME 3. It contains new features as well as smaller improvements and bug fixes. In total, the release incorporates 28,933 changes made by approximately 837 contributors.
2016-03-24 12:39 Madison Moore sdtimes.com
82 Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Yoga is an outstanding 2-in-1 from any angle The ThinkPad product line has for years produced outstanding business laptops. The tradition continues with the ThinkPad X1 Yoga from Lenovo. The notebook features a 14-inch display that can rotate 360 degrees, providing four configurations for the professional. The ThinkPad X1 Yoga is a thin laptop first, with typical ruggedizing for handling an active mobile professional. The black case is constructed of durable alloy hiding a rugged skeleton. The durable construction is quite a feat when keeping the weight at only 2.8 pounds. The Yoga has a touch screen and oversized trackpad, designed to take full advantage of the versatility of Windows 10. It also features a nice keyboard, typical for the ThinkPad line. The Yoga designation means this laptop can work in four different modes to best fit any situation. These modes consist of the standard laptop; tent; stand; tablet. Introducing Roadshow Welcome to Roadshow, CNET's essential destination for car owners, buyers and enthusiasts. Laptop mode is the one most likely to be used regularly. It's a typical clamshell mode with the advantage of a wide range of viewing angles. Simply open the lid to the desired angle and get to work. Tent mode is achieved by pushing the lid until the Yoga forms an inverted "V". This is good for giving impromptu presentations on the go. Stand mode is for viewing video. Push the lid almost underneath the keyboard, allowing the display to face what is normally backwards. Tablet use is a simple matter of pushing the lid all the way under the keyboard and using the Yoga as a slate in the hand. The display auto-rotates to fit the unit orientation. First and foremost the ThinkPad X1 Yoga is a laptop. It has a large 14-inch touch display in a package that is just over half an inch thick and less than three pounds. It takes full advantage of Windows 10 Pro. The battery lasts 11 hours in our testing, making it a good solution for taking on trips. That's enough to get through long work days and still have juice in the tank. While the display is larger at 14 inches than most thin and light laptops, the svelte package lessens the impact of the size. Pulling it out of the bag and using it is as good as it gets for laptops. When you use a ThinkPad laptop you are using one of the best keyboards in the laptop world. The keyboard on the Yoga is no exception, especially with the oversized trackpad. While not my favorite ThinkPad keyboard, the Yoga's chiclet keys are still nicely done. PC, tablet and smartphone trends, and the rise of the hybrid Desktop PCs are not going away anytime soon, and nor are traditional laptops or slate-style tablets. But all are retreating into their core niches and therefore selling in decreasing numbers. The backlit keys have decent travel and a nice feel when typing on the Yoga. The inclusion of a red TrackStick along with three large mouse buttons work with the large trackpad to fit most anyone's preference. To keep the Yoga as thin as possible, the keys sink down into the device. This keeps them out of the way when used with the keyboard sitting on a surface in stand mode. The top row of Fn keys double as control keys for the ThinkPad X1 Yoga. These cover the range from volume control to display brightness. The ThinkPad X1 Yoga can be used as a tablet, making it a true 2-in-1. The 14-inch touch display makes this a productive function. Turning the Yoga around in tablet mode causes the screen to rotate appropriately, making is possible to use in the user's favorite orientation. Tablet use is as expected with a touch screen, and this is augmented by the inclusion of a pen. In a nice touch, the pen is stored in a silo on the left side of the laptop, ready to be pulled out when needed. This facilitates taking notes in meetings. The ThinkPad X1 Yoga has proven to be a top laptop in our testing. The great keyboard, large display, and svelte form have been easy to take on the road. It is typical ThinkPad quality, and an outstanding business system.
2016-03-24 12:30 James Kendrick zdnet.com.feedsportal.com
83 Review: Get onto 4G on a budget with Innos M34T aka SsabaSimu Nowadays smartphones come in all shapes, colors and sizes. You can find one for just about any price you’re willing to pay. As such we’ve come to wonder if some internet-enabled phones should really be called smartphones at all, what with all the trouble getting their negligible RAM to perform basic functions! I’m happy to inform you that the pocket-friendly Vodafone SsabaSimu, the “innos M34T” doesn’t make the list of the mind bogglingly slow, unimpressive excuses for smartphones. When you pick up the super slim SabaSiimu from the Vodafone store, your wallet won’t be the only thing smiling. Here’s why; Unboxing The box, at purchase contains a 5.0V-1A charger, multi-purpose USB cable, 3.5 mm Headset jack, a couple of Quick start guides and a slim 4.5” long “innos” handset to get you off to a great start. General Specs Display: 4.5 inches, Resolution:450 x 854 pixels (240 dpi) Operating System: Android 5.1.1 Lollipop Network: GSM/WCDMA/LTE Band Memory: 8GB ROM, 1GB RAM, Micro SD Slot expandable up to 32GB Battery Capacity: – 1800mAh Band: GSM: 900/1800 WCDMA: 900/2100 LTE:Band3/7/20 CPU: 1.2GHz quad-core Processor (MSM Qualcomm) Camera: 5 MP back Camera with flash, 2 MP front Camera without Flash. Data: GPRS, EDGE, 3G, 3.75G, 4G LTE Performance It’s bright, that screen and it’s beautiful. The SsabaSimu has a very clean feel, a really bright screen even out in the bright sub-Saharan Africa sun, you’re covered! The screen is wide and long enough to support most of your favorite games, with an appreciable resolution. The SsabaSimu makes clear voice calls with an adjustable volume for both the earpiece and clear speaker-phone. You’ll hardly have to adjust positioning of the phone in order to catch what the person on the other line is saying to you. The SsabaSmu is running on Android 5.1.1 Lollipop which gives you an easier and more fluid experience browsing through the phone and switching between applications with minimum cases of hang-time or slow responses. The interfaces have been untouched and will need some work and personalization with your favorite Apps to pimp the stock Android surfaces. Camera The 5 megapixel back camera takes decent images especially with day light and enhances night pictures with a flash. The phone has a 2 Megapixel front phone camera that’s quite impressive. Say hello to Snapchat any time! Here’s what expect. Battery Life This little beauty will carry you well through your 20-hour day on regular functions such as calls, FM radio, and minimal internet usage of about 4 to 5 applications and even tether the rest of your crew to your data package if you like. You don’t have much to worry about or even scrum around searching for power banks as is the case for all things “smart” nowadays. This is a huge plus for the SsabaSimu! What’s even more interesting is that this phone when left alone will fully for no more than three (3) hours to give you six (6) times as much battery life. Internet Connectivity The SabaSiimu boasts a 4G LTE network connectivity, when you can find it and it’s quite brilliant! 3G and 2G connections work just as well, just as long as it’s not loaded with Apps you’re really never going to use, its processing speed shouldn’t take you on a journey of patience and longsuffering. Value for Money The Innos M34T or more popularly known as Vodafone’s SabbaSimu is arguably an entry level smartphone but definitely gives you value for your money. Going for Ugshs 299,000/- only at all Vodafone stores , you’ll arm yourself with a 4G LTE connection on a relatively low budget. What we like What we don’t like
2016-03-24 12:18 Joanitah Nalubega pctechmag.com
84 Salesforce rolls out Desk 360 to combine sales and service tools for SMBs Desk.com, the Salesforce platform aimed at small businesses, is launching a new service designed to bring sales and customer service together in one product. Dubbed Desk 360, the product works to give SMB support teams more context surrounding customer issues, helping them respond with the right information, and ultimately, improve the customer service experience. Salesforce touts Desk 360 as offering a "holistic view of the customer". Among the features of Desk 360 are new customer and company views, which allows support agents to set parameters, sort, filter and view a complete history of either that particular customer, or an entire company. There's also customer and company insights, which offer agents a complete look at previous customer interactions with a particular client or company, as well as an opportunity management function that provides agents with product and sales suggestions tailored to each customer. Salesforce first unveiled Desk.com in early 2012 as an online social help desk platform that integrates social networks (Facebook and Twitter) with email, phone and web on a single desktop agent. Since then it has been bolstered with a bevy of different analytics and reporting features as well as customizable dashboards specific to customer service agents and additional APIs for integrating data from other apps. Most recently, Desk.com rolled out Business Plus , a service geared toward service managers and agents at both startups and SMBs.
2016-03-24 12:00 Natalie Gagliordi zdnet.com.feedsportal.com
85 Hands on: 4K TCL Roku TV review The original TCL Roku TV was good, but the 4K TCL Roku TV is better. How much better is it, you ask? By my estimate, about 6,220,000 pixels better. Lame jokes aside, TCL's latest sets are actually a natural, impressive evolution for its Roku TV series. We first heard the pitch for 4K UHD Roku TVs back in January 2015, but it wasn't until CES 2016 – one full year later – that we saw the first shelf-ready models. Like the first TCL Roku TVs that came out in 2014, the premise of the 4K Roku TVs is a simple one: take the robust content library on Roku and embed it straight into a television, no extra boxes or cables needed. As the name suggests, TCL's latest panels are able to stream 4K content from apps like Netflix, Amazon Instant Video, Ultra Flix and Vudu, as well as play 4K content from an external source, thanks to its four HDMI 2.0 ports that support HDCP 2.2. The 4K Roku TV will launch in two series, P and S. The S-Series (the 'S' stands for Smart) comes in a 55 and 65-inch variety and start at $599 for the smaller panel and jump up to $999 for the 65-incher. The P-Series (the 'P' stands for Premium), on the other hand, starts at $499 for a 43" screen, $599 for a 50", $699 for a 55" and goes up to $1,099 for a 65-incher. If there's one thing you can count on from the Chinese panel manufacturer, it's a good a price. Chris Larson, VP of sales and marketing at TCL, says that's because, unlike many other TV manufacturers out there, TCL makes most of the components inside the panel. Both the S-Series and P-Series use the platform-agnostic Roku OS, both come equipped with the latest 802.11ac wireless antenna and Ethernet port for lag-free streaming, and both will have access to the same firmware updates. While the two are almost identical on paper, they work slightly differently due to difference in remotes – the S-Series comes with a "dumb" remote, while the P-Series comes with a smart one that's nearly identical the one found on the Roku 4 . So, how was test-driving the first 4K Roku TV to ditch the streaming player? So long as you can live without high-dynamic range (or HDR) content, simply excellent. Design-wise, the 4K TCL Roku TV isn't a wild departure from its predecessor, but it does make a few subtle changes that add to the original's sleek design. The first thing you'll notice after drooling at the 4K image on-screen is the razor-thin, black bezel that encases the image. It's one of the most striking features of the original, and I'm glad to see it make a return on TCL's 2016 line-up. Like most of the 2015 models – the S3800, S3750, FS3800 and FS3850 – this year's lineup will stand on two sets of legs instead of a traditional pedestal. In theory, this should prevent the TV from potentially tipping over. Though, whether the former or the latter is better looking is up for debate. Inside the screen, you'll find TCL's Creative Pro 4K UHD up-scaling technology that delivers near-4K quality from 1080p HD sources and 802.11ac, dual band Wi-Fi, a big step up from last year's 802.11n wireless adapter that could only push about 600Mbps. Should you have the cabling available, however, Larson recommends hardwiring the TV to your network via the newly added ethernet port to decrease buffering time and improve image quality. Speaking of ports, you can spot four HDMI 2.0 ports on the rear of the panel that support HDCP 2.2, the latest content protection protocol that allows Ultra HD content to pass through hassle- free. The final new addition, at least on the P-Series, is the enhanced remote that integrates voice search via a built-in microphone and headphone jack similar to the one found on Roku 2, Roku 3, Roku 4 and Roku Streaming Stick remotes for private listening. I didn't spend as much time as I would've liked perusing my Netflix queue and checking for hot spots produced by the LED backlight. But, from what I did see, the 4K Roku TV produced a solid 4K picture with decent contrast and relatively rich colors. I'm disappointed that TCL is skipping the opportunity to add HDR support for the 2016 lineup, but Larson told me that TCL would have more to show on that front down the road. Like the new Vizio SmartCast P-Series TVs that I saw recently, I didn't find the TCL 4K Roku TVs overall picture to be as bright or as vivid as LG's G6 OLED and didn't pop the same way Samsung's SUHD with Quantum Dot did at CES 2016 a few months ago. But, for its price, the picture quality is still darn good. Even the brightest and most vivid of TVs are worthless without a strong library of content to back them up. Thankfully, when it comes to content, TCL has got Roku on its side. The Roku TV operating system (OS) looks almost identical to the one found on the streaming boxes, which is a very good thing. On multiple occasions, I've called Roku the most egalitarian OS on the market, and the same could be said for the version you'll get on TCL's new panels. It doesn't care whether you pick Netflix over Amazon, or Vudu over Hulu. It doesn't want to sell you an Rdio subscription, and it couldn't care less if you were to join YouTube Red. At the end of the day, all Roku cares about is getting you to the content you want through the most affordable means possible. It achieves this by implementing a universal search function that scans 30 services like Amazon Instant Video, MGO, Showtime, Netflix and HBO Now for the lowest price. "And that number keeps going up all the time," Larson said. "If you would've asked me last week, I would've only been able to say that we search 25 channels. " In total, the Roku platform has more than 3,000 channels, including live TV services, like Sling TV , music channels, like Pandora and Spotify and media streaming services, like Plex. One of the features Larson and his team are most excited about bringing to the 4K lineup is Roku's 4K Spotlight Channel that hosts a curated list of all the movies available to stream in Ultra High-Definition. In addition to the curated content provided by Roku, the OS allows you to create a curated content list of your own in Roku Feed. It works by searching movies, new or old, and adding them to the list. Then, when they get a price drop or pop on to services like Netflix or HBO, you'll get an alert on your TV and Roku app if you have it installed. The Roku app, admittedly, is my least favorite aspect of Roku. Screen-casting is still possible through the Play on Roku feature inside the app, but it's nowhere near as accessible as it is on devices like Chromecast or Apple TV. By adopting Roku's platform and striving to achieve the most accessible prices on the market, TCL has taken every step necessary to compete with LED TV juggernauts Samsung and LG in 2016. Slight tweaks to this year's sets should improve the already outstanding experience of owning a Roku TV, and I don't think anyone would complain about the addition of 6,220,000 pixels. That said, it would've been great to see TCL tackle HDR streaming, but perhaps that's something coming sooner rather than later. The 4K TCL Roku TV 5800 model will be available for pre-order on Amazon starting today, and units will start shipping out March 30 with additional models and retailers to follow.
2016-03-24 12:00 Not yet feedproxy.google.com
86 86 Q&A: Tech Data CEO Talks Ingram-HNA Deal, Blossoming Apple Partnership and Dell-EMC Synergies Capturing New Opportunities Tech Data recorded yet another stellar quarter, increasing profits by 8 percent to $80.9 million, while sales for the Clearwater, Fla.-based distribution giant climbed 2 percent to $7.48 billion. Tech Data CEO Bob Dutkowsky spoke with CRN after the earnings call about why the premium Tianjin Tianhai paid for Ingram Micro is promising for the distribution industry as a whole, how Apple penetrated the enterprise to become Tech Data's largest partner, and why he believes Dell and EMC have become so channel-centric. Read on to learn why Dutkowsky thinks Tech Data outperformed its competitors last quarter, why so many emerging vendors are looking to link up with distributors, and how the Clearwater, Fla.-based company plans to capture opportunities in the enterprise and network security space.
2016-03-24 11:44 Michael Novinson www.crn.com
87 How Kinect is helping people to breathe Microsoft's motion-sensing Kinect peripheral never quite took off as the future of gaming, but it's proving enduringly popular among scientists as a low-cost imaging device. In the past we've seen it used to study glaciers and asteroids , for shopping analytics , in supermarket trolleys and even keeping peace on the Korean border . Now, a team of British healthcare researchers is using the technology to assess the respiratory function of hospital patients. They've combined four Kinect sensors into a system that can quickly create a 3D image of a patient's torso, allowing a doctor to measure how the chest wall moves. During testing, the system not only already proved more accurate than current methods , but also yields additional data about chest movement that could help to identify respiratory problems, such as cystic fibrosis. But the biggest advantage, its creators say, is its low price - each Kinect sensor costs just £100. "For patients who report to A&E a quick and low-cost method of chest wall motion assessment is required," explains Chris Golby from the Institute of Digital Healthcare, who worked on the project. "Our prototype allows physicians to make accurate assessments. It is also potentially very useful in assessing changes in respiratory physiology that occur during exercise. " Given that respiratory diseases kill one in five people in the UK and cost the National Health Service more than £6 billion per year, it's no surprise that the researchers have labelled their device as a "game-changer". The full details on the Kinect-based system were published in the journal Medical & Biological Engineering & Computing. Article continues below
2016-03-24 11:41 By Duncan feedproxy.google.com
88 Chinese citizen pleads guilty to hacking US defense contractor systems A Chinese citizen has pleaded guilty to hacking offences against US contractors in the quest for sensitive data. The aviation specialist, 50-year-old Su Bin, was arrested in July 2014 after law enforcement became suspicious of his role in cyberattacks against US defense contractors including Boeing, which produces military jets and technology for the country's military. In a press release on Wednesday , the US Department of Justice (DoJ) said the Chinese national, also known as "Stephen Su" and "Steven Subin," pleaded guilty to a conspiracy to break into contractor systems in the quest for sensitive military and "export-controlled" data. Once acquired, this information ended up in China, where its value is incalculable to the Chinese government and military. Su Bin worked with two other people to ferret out the best targets in the aerospace and military fields. From October 2008 to March 2014, Su Bin would email his co-conspirators with guidance notes on their chosen victims -- including what people, firms and technologies to target. One of the other cybercriminals would then break into the victim's network and email Su the lists of directories they were able to access. The executive then told his associated which information was most valuable and worth stealing. Once this data was stolen and the cyberattacker erased his tracks, the executive translated the documents from English to Chinese and send the information to recipients in his home country. The Chinese national was arrested in Canada in 2014, and eventually agreed to waive his extradition rights, traveling to the United States in February 2016. Su Bin admitted his guilt as part of a plea bargain in the Central District of California court in front of US District Judge Christina Snyder. US prosecutors say the Chinese executive could face up to five years in prison and a fine of $250,000 or twice the gross gain or loss based on the cyberattack campaign. "Su Bin admitted to playing an important role in a conspiracy, originating in China, to illegally access sensitive military data, including data relating to military aircraft that are indispensable in keeping our military personnel safe," said Assistant Attorney General Carlin. "This plea sends a strong message that stealing from the United States and our companies has a significant cost; we can and will find these criminals and bring them to justice. The National Security Division remains sharply focused on disrupting cyber threats to the national security, and we will continue to be relentless in our pursuit of those who seek to undermine our security. " Sentencing is due on July 13.
2016-03-24 11:31 Charlie Osborne zdnet.com.feedsportal.com
89 89 Energy Star 3.0 server spec to look at coprocessors for more accurate power-efficiency ratings The U. S. Environmental Protection Agency is revising the Energy Star specification for servers to take into account significant system design changes and help buyers make effective purchasing decisions. Over the last few years, server makers have increasingly used coprocessors to boost computing power and given memory a bigger role in processing data. While memory has gotten more power-efficient, coprocessors can suck up a lot of energy. The upcoming version 3.0 of the Energy Star spec for servers is aimed at helping buyers understand the power-efficiency levels of the new systems. The Energy Star program is already used in computers, appliances, electronics and many other products. An Energy Star label is typically placed on products that meet certain power specifications. The EPA last week sent out a letter to program participants, including server makers, to revise specifications that will "account for advances in technology and raise the bar on energy efficiency requirements for servers. " The Energy Star 2.0 certification program for servers took effect on Dec. 12, 2013. The new program will account for FPGAs (field-programmable gate arrays), which are being used in more servers. FPGAs are extremely fast at executing defined tasks but can be power hungry, which could affect the overall power efficiency rating of a server. Microsoft has built servers that rely on FPGAs to deliver more accurate Bing results, and Baidu is using FPGAs to speed up image classification and search. Intel spent $16.7 billion to buy the number-one FPGA company, Altera, and will integrate FPGAs inside its chips. In an e-mail explaining changes to the Energy Star specification, EPA specialist Steven Hanson said, "In Version 3.0, we plan to expand our approach on auxiliary processing accelerators (APAs), which includes GPGPUs and FPGAs, as updates to the test methodology. " GPUs are being used in some of the world's fastest computers. They are also central to processing data based on machine-learning models deployed by companies like Google, Facebook and IBM. A bigger focus will also be placed on the active state of servers, in addition to increasing the idle state power efficiency requirements. Energy Star 2.0 took active-state test benchmarks from the SERT (Server Efficiency Rating Tool) tool provided by an industry standard organization called Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation. For Energy Star 3.0, the EPA will engage other industry groups, like Green Grid, to improve on the current specification. The new certification program will also take memory and storage into account, Hanson said. The EPA will also work with the European Commission on Energy Star 3.0 for servers. The Energy Star 3.0 stakeholders will collaborate on the final specification. Work on the new specification is just starting, and it could take a few years for the final version to come out.
2016-03-24 11:28 Agam Shah www.computerworld.com
90 Mesosphere raises $73.5 million in series C funding Mesosphere, creators of the world’s first Datacenter Operating System (DCOS), today announced it has closed $73.5 million in a Series C funding round led by Hewlett Packard Enterprise, with Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT ) joining as a new strategic investor. The round brings Mesosphere’s total funding to date to nearly $126 million and supports the company’s accelerating growth as DCOS becomes the de facto standard for enterprises operating containers and distributed systems in production. Mesosphere also announced the version 1.0 release of Marathon , the container operations system for DCOS, and the new Mesosphere Velocity platform for improving developer agility via continuous integration and continuous deployment with the DCOS. Also participating in this round are previous Mesosphere investors Andreessen Horowitz, Khosla Ventures, and Fuel Capital, as well as new investors A Capital and Triangle Peak Partners. “We’re experiencing an exciting new era in the enterprise datacenter, and Mesosphere is leading the charge,” said Lak Ananth, Managing Director at Hewlett Packard Ventures . “Mesosphere’s DCOS is the most exciting new enterprise operating system since Linux, and Hewlett Packard Ventures is excited to partner with them to support their rapid growth.” “Mesosphere is at the center of three of the biggest tech trends today — cloud, containerization, and microservices,” said Scott Guthrie, Executive Vice President of Microsoft’s Cloud + Enterprise division. “Mesosphere’s DCOS is preferred by our enterprise customers given the maturity of the container orchestration solution, and that’s why we chose it as a key component for bringing containers to our enterprise-grade Microsoft Azure cloud platform.” Mesosphere makes it simple for enterprises to build, install, manage and scale today’s must- have technologies, including Docker, Apache Cassandra, Jenkins, Apache Kafka and Apache Spark. Mesosphere’s DCOS and the open source technologies that comprise it (including Apache Mesos and Marathon) are proven foundations for building microservices-based applications, running big data systems and operating massive production container environments. The new products announced today further Mesosphere’s lead as the most production-proven platform for running modern applications. Enterprises use the Mesosphere DCOS in production and at massive scale in some of the world’s largest private datacenters, including at Verizon. Customers can take advantage of DCOS in public cloud environments, as well. It can run on cloud instances just like it does on bare metal, and is a key component of Microsoft’s Azure Container Service. Mesosphere DCOS is the first major operating system introduced since Android, and the first ever operating system purpose-built for datacenter-scale systems and applications. The open source core of DCOS, Apache Mesos, originally gained prominence as the key technology that killed the Fail Whale at Twitter , and was the platform on which Apache Spark was built at the University of California at Berkeley, AMPLab. Mesosphere Velocity and Marathon v1.0 The open source Marathon 1.0 improves container operations through new features around networking and security, and kicks off an aggressive development roadmap over the next year that will bring about additional improvements in areas such as high availability, seamless upgrades and privacy. Marathon has a long list of production users, including Yelp, which uses it to launch more than 1 million containers a day for code testing.
2016-03-24 11:25 SD Times sdtimes.com
91 91 Preorder iPhone SE: New iPhone SE UK release date, price, full specifications, performance benchmarks - 4in iPhone is more iPhone 6s than iPhone 5s with top performance and camera Apple has confirmed its new 4in iPhone as the iPhone SE (Special Edition), which is available to preorder tomorrow (24 March) and goes on sale from £359 on 31 March. More iPhone 6s than iPhone 5s , this mini iPhone has the power Apple A9 processor and includes a 12Mp iSight camera. Here's everything you need to know about the iPhone SE UK release date, price and specifications. Plus: Apple's iPhone SE launch as it happened. Also see: iPad Pro 9.7in UK release date, price and specifications . The iPhone SE will be available to pre-order from 24 March 2016, and will go on sale on 31 March. At first it will be available in Australia, Canada, China, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Japan, New Zealand, Puerto Rico, Singapore, the UK and the US, but it will be available in 110 countries by the end of May. See also: iPad Air 3 release date, price and specs rumours . The 16GB iPhone SE will cost £359 in the UK and $399 in the US, and the 64GB iPhone SE will cost £429 in the UK and $499 in the US. It will be available in space grey, silver, gold and rose gold. You can pre-order the new iPhone SE direct from Apple from Thursday 24 March. It’s available in Silver, Gold, Space Grey and Rose Gold. The 16GB option is £359 while the larger 64GB option is £439. If you buy direct from Apple, the phone will come unlocked so you can use it on any UK network. EE says all handsets bought from EE direct channels will support EE’s WiFi Calling service and 4G Calling (VoLTE), and the iPhone SE is available to pre-order from EE from 24 March. Vodafone says c ustomers who opt for the iPhone SE on Vodafone’s ultrafast 4G network can also enjoy Vodafone’s Data Test Drive for the first two months of their contract, meaning they can get to grips with their new iPhone SE without any limitations on their UK data usage. Furthermore, Vodafone’s Wi-Fi Calling service will be available on the iPhone SE, making it possible to stay connected anywhere there is Wi-Fi – from a basement flat to the London Underground. Pre-order here. O2 allows you to register your interest in the iPhone SE, which will be available in all colours here in a similar way to EE. Carphone Warehouse allows you to pre-order here , while you can do the same at Mobiles.co.uk here . And Three points out that those who buy the iPhone SE from them will benefit from its Feel At Home policy (no roaming charges in selected countries), 4G at no extra cost, and a six-month free Deezer subscription. It will be stocking all four colours of the new iPhone. According to Apple, you'll be able to buy official accessories for the iPhone SE including leather cases in black and midnight blue (£29 inc VAT), and Lightning Docks in colour-matched metallic finishes for £39 inc VAT, both from Apple’s retail stores and Apple.com/uk . The iPhone SE looks very much like an iPhone 5s with the familia 4in Retina (326ppi) display, but with a new rose gold option, matt chamfered edges and a stainless steel Apple logo. On the inside, though, it's very much a smaller iPhone 6s and, according to Apple, it's the most powerful 4in phone ever. With the same 64-bit Apple A9 processor and M9 motion co-processor as the iPhone 6s, the iPhone SE is twice as fast as the iPhone 5s on raw performance, and three times as fast for graphics. And that's not all that's fast. With the addition of 802.11ac Wi-Fi the iPhone SE can support download speeds up to 433Mbps. It also supports faster 150Mbps LTE with more bands, plus Wi-Fi calling. There have also been some improvements to battery life, with the iPhone SE beating the iPhone 5s' runtime for audio (50 hours vs 40 hours), video (13 hours vs 10 hours), Wi-Fi- and LTE browsing (13 hours vs 10 hours), and 3G talk time (14 hours vs 10 hours). With a new NFC chip inside and the Touch ID fingerprint scanner the iPhone SE also supports Apple Pay for making mobile payments. Read more about how you can take advantage of this in our Apple Pay guide. In common with its bigger brother, the SE features a 12Mp iSight camera with Focus Pixels and a True Tone flash. There's a new image signal processor and support for 4K video recording and panoramic images up to 63Mp, plus Apple's Live Photo feature. The photo below will give you some idea of what the iPhone SE's camera is capable of. At the front the iPhone SE has a Facetime HD camera with a new Retina Flash, that lights up the screen three times brighter for taking the ultimate selfie. The iPhone SE runs the new iOS 9.3 operating system. We should make it clear that we have not yet benchmarked the iPhone SE. However, it has the same hardware as the iPhone 6s, and according to Apple should perform the same (therefore we assume the iPhone SE must have 2GB of RAM like the 6s, although Apple has not confirmed this). Below are our benchmark results from our iPhone 6s review. The iPhone 6s scored 2511 in single-core mode and 4404 in multi-core mode in Geekbench, putting it just behind the processing power of the Galaxy S6, which scored 4438 points. It beat the HTC One M9 by a whopping 626 points, scoring 3778 points, which would normally be an acceptable score. However, it’s in the graphics department that the iPhone 6s really flexes its muscles. We ran two GFXBench tests – T-Rex and Manhattan, the same tests that our colleagues use when testing Android devices, and compared the results. Samsung’s Galaxy S6 managed a respectable 30fps in T-Rex and 14fps in Manhattan, while the iPhone 6s scored a whopping 59fps in T-Rex and 56fps in Manhattan. Colours: Silver, Gold, Space Grey, Rose Gold Display: 4in Retina (1136x640, 326ppi) LED-backlit widescreen Multi-Touch display, 800:1 contrast ratio, 500cd/m2 brightness, fingerprint-resistant oleophobic coating Processor & graphics: 64-bit Apple A9 processor with M9 motion co-processor Storage: 16GB/64GB Operating system: iOS 9.3 Primary camera: 12Mp iSight camera with five-element lens, sapphire crystal lens cover, f/2.2 aperture, Focus Pixels, True Tone flash, Live Photo, Panorama up to 63Mp, Auto HDR for photos, 4K video recording at 30fps, slow-mo and time-lapse recording Selfie camera: 1.2Mp Facetime HD camera with f/2.4 aperture, Retina Flash, 720p video recording Connectivity: 802.11ac Wi-Fi (up to 433Mbps), 4G LTE (19 bands, up to 150Mbps), Bluetooth 4.2, A-GPS and GLONASS, NFC (for Apple Pay) Battery life: Up to 14 hours 3G talk time, 13 hours 4G/Wi-Fi internet, 13 hours video, 50 hours audio, 10 days standby Sensors: TouchID fingerprint scanner, three-axis gyro, accelerometer, proximity sensor, ambient light sensor Dimensions: 123.8x58.6x7.6mm Weight: 113g The iPhone SE is expected to be a cross between the iPhone 6 and 6s in specification, but come in a smaller iPhone 5s case with a 4in screen. In fact, according to 9to5Mac it will be identical to the 5s with matt edges. GSM Arena says it will feature some features of the iPhone 6s, such as a 12Mp camera with 4K video recording, but not its 3D Touch tech. One way to work out how the phone might look ahead of launch is to look at cases made for it. Mobile Fun has already started receiving iPhone SE cases and recorded the below video comparing the X-Doria Defense 360 and Bump Gear cases to an iPhone 5s. PC Advisor was in mid-March contacted by Nick, founder of Beeep, as he unveiled a hands-on with an iPhone SE the company had come across in the 'wild' at Huaqiangbei Shenzhen, China. The video below shows the iPhone SE as a rounded iPhone-type phone, which is what we expect to see launched by Apple. As stated in the video, the iPhone wouldn't power on, so we suspect it to be a copy or pre-production model of the iPhone SE. Furthermore, the Rose Gold version seemed to be a little different than an authentic Apple iPhone 6s. On 10 March 2016, there have been sources that have confirmed UK carriers (such as Vodafone) are running down of iPhone 5s stocks, ahead of the 4in iPhone SE launch. On 9 March 2016, accessory company Spigen has released some new cases for the 4in iPhone. Images were shared with MacRumors, which suggest an iPhone 6 looking phone. OnLeaks have also shared some photos of iPhone SE cases which also indicate that the new 4in iPhone will have rounded edges. On 29 February 2016, a few image renders were created by Martin Hajek , who combined the various different rumoured iPhone SE designs and created interesting 3D renders (see below). If you're interested in more image renders, they can be also found here (see image below). On 24 February 2016 images leaked from OnLeaks , suggest that prototypes of the new 4in iPhone that were tested by Apple. According to the image above, we Apple seem to be testing iPhones which look very similar to the iPhone 5s' design and yet also incorporates certain iPhone 6/6s design elements. The most interesting part of these leaked images is the fact that both versions come with a 3.5mm headphone jack and furthermore, the speaker design seems to have shifted from an uneven 5s design, to a more symmetric speaker design. Might we finally see dual downward- firing stereo speakers from Apple? This would be a great addition for those looking to improve the overall sound quality and loudness of the iPhone's sound output. An image render from OnLeaks have leaked, suggesting the two prototypes pictured are extremely similar to the iPhone 5s' design and yet has certain elements of the iPhone 6 line's design. This suggests Apple has utilised their old iPhone design and thrown in hardware found in the 6/6s line. From the leaked renders, the images seem to suggest that the 3.5mm jack is still present and that Apple was thinking of two separate speaker designs, whereby the newest image seems to suggest a smaller, more symmetric speaker design. Might we see dual downward-firing speakers from Apple? Time will tell. For the sake of comparison, we have left the older rumours below. Previously, there was an image floating around the internet (see below), which suggested a leaked photo of the iPhone SE. We cannot verify if this is the actual phone itself and it has now been suggested that the iamge is fake. As with any rumour, take it with a pinch of salt, as earlier in 2016 a video of the iPhone SE was supposedly leaked and genuine, but then later turned out to be fake. On 27 January 2016, we were informed by Mobile Fun of their Ringke Fusion case in Smoke Black and Crystal View that's been listed on their site for £14.99. The interesting part to note here is not the availability of the cases, but rather the new 4in iPhone being named on Mobile Fun as the iPhone 6c and not the presumed iPhone SE. So far, no pictures are provided of the cases, so we cannot get an inkling on the look of the iPhone. Finally, according to a Japanese financial newspaper Nikkei (via AppleInsider ) , Apple started its production for the 4in phone over a year ago. Little is known if Apple was only making prototypes or the final product. Follow Marie Brewis on Twitter.
2016-03-24 11:21 Marie Brewis www.pcadvisor.co.uk
92 Save 73% on Samsung's Wireless Charging Pad - Deal Alert Samsung's EP-PG920IBUGUS Wireless Charging Pad gets 4 out of 5 stars from nearly 4,000 people on Amazon ( see reviews ), and at a dramatic 73% off you can purchase this one right now for just $27.17 (list price: $99.99). If you have a compatible Galaxy smartphone or other Qi-compatible device (or know somebody who does -- gift alert?), simply lay it down on the pad and it charges quickly via inductive charging. No plugs or wires involved in this transaction. It appears to be as simple as that, and many recent reviewers on Amazon seem to confirm. See this deal on Amazon now.
2016-03-24 11:15 DealPost Team www.itnews.com
93 Review: Amazon puts machine learning in reach As a physicist, I was originally trained to describe the world in terms of exact equations. Later, as an experimental high-energy particle physicist, I learned to deal with vast amounts of data with errors and with evaluating competing models to describe the data. Business data, taken in bulk, is often messier and harder to model than the physics data on which I cut my teeth. Simply put, human behavior is complicated, inconsistent, and not well understood, and it's affected by many variables. If your intention is to predict which previous customers are most likely to subscribe to a new offer, based on historical patterns, you may discover there are nonobvious correlations in addition to obvious ones, as well as quite a bit of randomness. When graphing the data and doing exploratory statistical analyses don’t point you at a model that explains what’s happening, it might be time for machine learning. To continue reading this article register now Learn More Existing Users Sign In
2016-03-24 11:05 Martin Heller www.computerworld.com
94 YouTube Connect could knock Periscope off its throne Google is heavily rumored to be working on a competitor to live-streaming apps such as Periscope and Facebook Live. Sources have told VentureBeat that Google has been quietly working on a new mobile service called YouTube Connect, which will allow you to live-stream directly to your subscriber base. YouTube Connect will be available on both iOS and Android devices while functionality won't differ much from the competition, according to a source close to the matter. You will be able to log in using your Google or YouTube account, so it's expected you could stream straight to your subscriber base and take advantage of your dedicated followers. Allegedly you'll also be able to store previous broadcasts within the app, so if your followers miss out you can upload them at a later date. The source claims that there is currently no way of sharing the links to Facebook or Twitter though, but that may change before it is released. We'd hope that YouTube Connect will make an appearance at Google I/O when it starts in May. Article continues below
2016-03-24 11:04 By James feedproxy.google.com
95 Rockstar came close to making Grand Theft Auto: Tokyo Rockstar had plans to make Grand Theft Auto: Tokyo, and even carried out a reference trip for the game, techradar has learned. Rockstar visited the Japanese capital several years ago to assess its potential for a full GTA game, but ultimately pulled the plug on the idea, according to a source close to the company. Before working on a new game Rockstar carries out reference trips to take pictures, meet locals, and generally get a feel for the area. Our source said that Rockstar was "serious" about the idea of making a Tokyo version around the time of GTA 3 and Vice City, however the road system was seen to be problematic and became one reason the idea was canned. In December 2003, Take-Two Interactive actually filed trademarks for GTA: Tokyo, GTA: Bogota as well as the particularly mysterious Grand Theft Auto: Sin City. Our source added that, as time has gone on, Rockstar has realised the difficulty in moving Grand Theft Auto outside of the USA, where it has firmly embedded itself. There are a number of series staples, from brands to cars, that Rockstar would likely have to change if a future GTA was set somewhere else. The source also revealed that preliminary work has begun on Grand Theft Auto 6, but said a location had not yet been settled on. It's not unusual that Rockstar would begin laying the early foundations for its next Grand Theft Auto so soon - It's been more than two years since the initial release of GTA 5. As for the more immediate future, there's a lot of speculation that next Red Dead game will be revealed this year, but there's a big question over where it could be the first to use a new Rockstar engine. In 2012 Rockstar put out a job advert for a position working on engine development for next-gen systems. "This is an exciting opportunity to develop cutting-edge architectures and high performance systems for current and next-gen platforms," it read, hinting that a new engine might be in the works. Even if Red Dead Redemption 2 doesn't use it, there's a very good chance that GTA 6 will. Article continues below
2016-03-24 10:59 By Hugh feedproxy.google.com
96 Google+ 7.5 update gets transparent about failed posts and squashes a colony of bugs The Google+ factory has been very busy of late, with numerous tweaks to improve the Android app’s speed and performance. Update 7.5 focuses on a batch of bug fixes and a helpful tool to remind you should a post fail to go live. You can touch the notification and try to send it off again if something goes awry, where before it would just be lost to the abyss. Googler Luke Wroblewski detailed many of changes in a Google+ post. You have more visibility of failed posts, with a quick option to try sending it again. He offered a very clear changelog of everything new: That final change is a continuation of work begun in version 7.3 which sped up Web page load times by using Chrome custom tabs: You can wait for the update to roll out through the Google Play Store or grab it now from APK Mirror .
2016-03-24 10:49 Derek Walter www.itnews.com
97 45% off Mini DisplayPort 1.2 to HDMI/DVI/VGA Adaptor - Deal Alert If you're like me, you love adaptors. You have boxes of them. For devices you haven't even owned in 10 years. Today we have a significant discount for you on a great one. This adaptor from gofanco connects Mini DisplayPort/Thunderbolt enabled devices to HDMI, DVI or VGA equipped monitors. Video quality up to 1080p@60Hz (DVI & VGA) and 4Kx2K@30Hz (HDMI). Also supports 7.1 Channel HD audio (HDMI). The adaptor is currently rated 4.5 out of 5 stars, from 208 people on Amazon ( see reviews ). List price is $39.99, but at 45% off you can pick this up right now for $21.88. See this discounted item on Amazon for more detail, and to review buying options. 2016-03-24 10:39 DealPost Team www.itnews.com
98 How to move photos from Flickr (unless you want to pay for storage): Upload your images to Google Photos for free Flickr recently made some changes to its free account that makes it harder for users to upload collections of images unless they upgrade to a Pro subscription. If this is cause enough for you to jump ship to another photo service such as Google Photos or Smugmug , then there are a few to choose from. In this feature we’ll show you how to move photos from Flickr and find them a new home. See also: Flickr recently announced that its very useful Uploader feature , one that allows you to backup entire photo libraries from Dropbox, iPhoto, local hard drives, and other services, would no longer be available for free accounts. You can still of course upload images to the site, but this will now be achieved manually rather than by the conveniently automated way that Uploader allowed. Before you go to the hassle of moving all your photos though it’s worth considering the fact that Flickr still continues to offer 1TB of free storage for your images, and any photos you take on your mobile devices will still automatically upload if you have the feature turned on. The Pro account is hardly a rip-off either, as it offers the Uploader, no-ads, advanced stats regarding who is viewing your photos, plus a twenty percent reduction in the cost of Adobe’s Creative Cloud suite, all for around £4 per month. If you’re already a Lightroom user then you’ll be able to continue using the free account with little noticeable difference, as the Lightroom’s own uploader can move collections on to Flickr without the need for a Pro account. Enthusiast photographers If you want something more than just a backup for mobile images then the two closest rivals to Flickr in terms of community and tools are Smugmug and 500PX. Of these two only 500PX has a free tier, but this is limited to twenty uploads per week. There’s a strong emphasis on licensing photos through the 500PX Marketplace so you can make money from your creations. Judging by the high quality of examples on display, this is certainly a place populated by those serious about photography. Upgrading to the 500PX Plus account costs roughly £1.40 per month, although you’ll need to pay the first year upfront. This allows you to have unlimited uploads and advanced statistics, which is a very reasonable deal. The best part is that for the first fourteen days of your account you have access to all the premium features, including unlimited uploads. So if you plan it right you can move your whole library and still have access to it after the trial period ends and you revert back to a free account. Smugmug is very similar in tone, although instead of a free tier you get a 14-day free trial instead. After that you can opt for the Basic package that offers unlimited storage, a dedicated, customisable website, and various sharing options, all for a slightly more costly £28 a year. Both Smugmug and 500PX come in cheaper than the Flickr Pro account, which amounts to around £35 for the year. So it’s worth giving some thought to where you want your aspiring photography career to reside. Casual photographers If all you’re after is a place to backup your photos, maybe from your smartphone or if you occasionally take shots when you’re on holiday, then Flickr is still a solid choice. Remember that the free account retains its 1TB of storage, plus the automatic upload feature on your phone or tablet will continue to work. For those not constantly taking hundreds of shots, the manual uploading of images to Flickr shouldn’t be too much of a chore. Especially if you don’t want to go through the inconvenience of switching platforms. It might even give you the impetus to be more selective of the images you save, thus improving your portfolio along the way. Of course, if you want to move to a free service then the most obvious platform currently around is Google Photos. This offers the ability to upload libraries, plus if you take pictures with a point and shot or mobile device then you should have unlimited storage. Those who prefer a DSLR or very high quality images will use up the storage allocated to their Google Drive account (which is free to set up and starts at 15GB). In fact any cloud storage service will provide a place to store your collection, and with some many offering multiple GBs of free storage we recommend using a few different ones so that you have more than one backup of your images. Check out our guide to the best online storage services for more details. Step 1: Download your Flickr Library The first thing you’ll need to do is download your images from Flickr. This is reasonably simple: just navigate to the Albums section on your Flickr page, move your mouse over an album and you’ll see an arrow icon appear in the bottom right corner. Click this to download the contents. Repeat these steps until all of your photos are on your hard drive. Step 2: Get the Google Photos Backup application Go to https://photos.google.com/apps and you’ll see a button that will download the Dekstop Uploader for Google Photos. Click this and when the.exe file has downloaded double click it to install the program. Step 3: Select which photos to backup Once the program is installed and you’ve entered your Google account details, you’ll be presented with a window asking you to choose your backup sources. The initial settings will automatically include pictures from any attached camera or storage device such as an SD card, the Desktop, and the My Pictures folder. To include specific destinations you just need to click the Add button and navigate to the relevant folder. If you haven’t already unzipped the Flickr albums you downloaded, do so now and then select the folder. Step 4: Select the image quality Below the destinations box you’ll see the Photo size section. In here you can choose between High Quality (usually smartphone or point and shoot camera level) or Original (larger files that are generated by DSLR cameras). If you choose High Quality then the storage is free, whereas Original will count against your Google Drive storage. Step 5: Back up your photos Once you’ve got the image settings and destinations sorted out click the Start Backup button at the bottom of the page and your images will begin to make their way to their new Google flavoured home. Step 6: Browsing your pictures Now whenever you want to upload new images or view your existing library, go to the task bar at the bottom of your screen, click on the up arrow in the right hand corner, then click on the Google Photos icon to see the options available to you. Don't forget you can also head to photos.google.com to see your library in any web browser, and you can install the Google Photos app on your iPhone or Android - it will back up your photos and videos (which makes it a better alternative to iCloud for many iPhone users). That's it you're all done. Your photos have a new home and it's time to go out and take some more. Happy shooting.
2016-03-24 10:30 Martyn Casserly www.pcadvisor.co.uk
99 Docker goes native for Windows and Mac For Linux users, Docker has always been a native application, but for Windows and OS X users, not so much. Docker intends to change that with beta releases of two new editions: Docker for Mac and Docker for Windows . Both are more than the Docker command-line interface, which has been available for multiple platforms. Rather, they integrate with native virtualization tools on their respective hosts -- the Apple Hypervisor Framework on the Mac and Microsoft Hyper-V on Windows -- so that Docker developers no longer need to rely on a third party to do container work on the platforms. Initially available in a private beta, Docker for Mac and Docker for Windows are meant to address the fact that working with Docker on the platforms involves setting up first- and third- party tooling. A Linux VM is still required on Mac and Windows, but at least the VM now runs via the tools available on the platforms. The new Docker apps are also meant to simplify the job of connecting containers within the app to the system and, in turn, the outside world. A built-in DNS server integrated with the host's networking stack provides container discovery services. Volume mounting will simply work; on the Mac, for instance, support for the inotify service within containers "works seamlessly... for volume-mounted directories. " The premise wasn't simply to put a new skin on existing applications, though Docker says the UIs for these apps can be further detailed. One of Docker's previous acquisitions, Kitematic , produces an attractive GUI front end for the Docker tool set. Docker for Mac/Windows doesn't yet leverage such a UI, but the plan is to see how it might integrate the tooling further along in the beta cycle. Those who want to use the Kitematic UI with Docker for Mac/Windows can still do so. The one ingredient still missing is integration with Windows-native containers , which will have to wait until Microsoft delivers the technology in more than a beta preview. For the time being, the Docker native app uses an Alpine Linux image, with the Docker engine pre-installed, as the VM where containers are assembled and executed. It's clear that Docker isn't going to wait for Microsoft. The plan is to have as much of the Docker tool set running as-is and cross-platform, ready to work with platform-native containers when they arrive on Windows to capture a new container developer market before it formally arrives.
2016-03-24 10:21 Serdar Yegulalp www.infoworld.com
100 Report: Google builds an Amazon Echo alternative while Nest turns to security Google and Nest reportedly have a bunch of new smart home products in the works, but there may not be much collaboration happening between the two Alphabet subsidiaries. On the Google side, the search giant may be working on a competitor to Amazon’s Echo connected speaker , according to The Information (via The Verge ). The story reveals no details about the product, but it seems like an obvious fit for Google, which has already made voice controls a centerpiece of its Android Wear smartwatch platform. A device that answers Internet queries and controls other smart home products could very well tie into Google’s broader efforts to create a new platform for the Internet of Things. Earlier this month, Recode reported that Nest had explored its own Echo-like product. But Nest ultimately abandoned the plans, partly out of concerns that an always-listening virtual assistant with ties to Google might freak people out. The Information now reports that Nest wanted to be involved with Google’s connected-speaker efforts, but was rebuffed. Where does that leave Nest? The company may now be turning its attention to home security , with three projects in development. One project, called “Keshi,” would automatically lock doors when everyone’s left the house, tying into the Home-Away detection in Nest’s existing thermostat, smoke detector, and security cameras. Another project, called “Pinna,” would detect when doors are open or closed, and would connect to the Internet via a third device called “Flintstone.” (These are probably all code-names.) It’s unclear, however, when any of these products might launch. The Information, which revealed the product details as part of a larger story on Nest’s struggles, claims that Nest has revised or killed some of its security efforts several times. In the meantime, Nest is integrating its own smart thermostat with the Echo and other Amazon devices that have the Alexa virtual assistant built in.
2016-03-24 10:13 Jared Newman www.itnews.com
Total 100 articles. Created at 2016-03-25 00:01