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85 articles, 2016-03-15 06:00 1 Microsoft accused of bundling new Windows 10 nagware into latest Patch Tuesday updates More Windows 10 nagware being sneaked into Microsoft updates,Operating (2.00/3) Systems,Software,Security ,Microsoft,operating system,Windows Update,security,patch Tuesday 2016-03-15 06:00 3KB www.theinquirer.net 2 Western Digital releases affordable WD PiDrive 314GB HDD for Raspberry Pi The Raspberry Pi line of computers are so much fun. By utilizing an OS-loaded memory card, it is easy to get started, making it a great project for young technology enthusiasts. (2.00/3) The Raspberry Pi line of computers are so much fun. By utilizing an OS-loaded memory card, it is easy... 2016-03-15 01:16 2KB betanews.com 3 Q&A: Dinsmore sees open source Apache Spark moving to new stage Contradictory information on open source Apache Spark performance is giving way to more reasonable assessments, according to analytics expert Thomas Dinsmore. 2016-03-15 06:00 5KB searchdatamanagement.techtarget.com 4 PCIe SSD roundup 2016: Some stall while others progress The PCIe SSD market is still important but PCIE flash drive makers are split between those that continue to develop their products and those for whom product evolution has stalled 2016-03-15 06:00 2KB www.computerweekly.com 5 Seven steps to becoming a digital business leader Developing employees to embrace a digital-first approach can bring significant personal and organisational benefits. 2016-03-15 06:00 2KB www.computerweekly.com 6 Big data in big numbers - it's time to forget the 'three Vs' and look at real-world figures The term 'big data' has lost its meaning, says Sean Jackson, who offers some numbers to explain its impact in the here and now,Business Software ,Big Data and Analytics,Exasol,in- memory database,Gartner,Moore's law,,Facebook,Analytics,Internet of Things 2016-03-15 06:00 1KB www.computing.co.uk 7 Oracle rushes out emergency patch to fix Java security flaw Java has a security flaw requiring an emergency patch. That's unusual, isn't it? ,Software,Internet,Internet of Things ,Java,Oracle,security,Patch,Wolfgang Kandek 2016-03-15 06:00 2KB www.v3.co.uk 8 The Computing Vendor Excellence Awards 2016 – enter now! Do you have what it takes to be a winner?,Software,Hardware ,Vendor Excellence Awards 2016-03-15 06:00 1KB www.computing.co.uk 9 Visa aims its secure payments tech at cloud-based banking apps The payments firm is expanding the scope of its tokenisation service ,Financial Solutions,Mobile Software ,Apple,Visa,smb-services,SMB Spotlight 2016-03-15 06:00 3KB www.computing.co.uk 10 Oracle users warned over virtualisation software licence risks “It's simply not clear what Oracle’s contractual position is in reference to virtualised hardware,” warns software company,Software,Cloud and Infrastructure ,Oracle,TmaxSoft,Virtualisation 2016-03-15 06:00 3KB www.computing.co.uk

11 Blockchain-as-a-Service and open-sourcing of platform code among a slew of blockchain announcements from IBM IBM determined not to miss out on the predicted blockchain boom,Developer ,blockchain,Bitcoin,IBM,IBM Watson Internet of Things,Internet of Things,z Systems,London Stock Exchange,The Linux Foundation,Jim Zemlin,Bluemix,Cloud Computing 2016-03-15 06:00 4KB www.computing.co.uk 12 Microsoft SQL Server to run on Linux with SQL Server 2016 Linux version of Microsoft SQL Server 2016 planned for release next year,Cloud and Infrastructure,Software ,Cloud,databases,SQL Server 2016-03-15 06:00 3KB www.v3.co.uk 13 Why bet365 is open sourcing its Erlang code Bet365's Chandru Mullaparthi explains why the online betting giant has adopted Erlang – and why you should, too,Open Source,Big Data and Analytics ,Erlang,bet365,open source 2016-03-15 06:00 822Bytes www.computing.co.uk 14 Intel shoots for 3D broadcasting with Replay Technologies acquisition The acquisition is indicative of growing digital transformation across industries ,Strategy,Hardware,Business Software ,Intel,Data,IBM,Digital 2016-03-15 06:00 2KB www.computing.co.uk 15 Opera to add native ad blocker to desktop web browser Need for speed? Opera's web browser will come with a built-in speedometer ,Software,Internet,Internet of Things,Cloud and Infrastructure ,Opera,Opera Software,Browsers 2016-03-15 06:00 2KB www.theinquirer.net 16 free Project Shield tool to help combat DDoS attacks Project Shield has been released for use by news and human rights organisations,Security Technology,Threats and Risks,Systems Tools ,Google,hack,hacking,Hackers,DDoS 2016-03-15 06:00 3KB www.computing.co.uk 17 Linux Mint website hacked – operating system download replaced with backdoored ISO Maintainers point finger of suspicion at three in Sofia, Bulgaria,Cloud and Infrastructure,Open Source,Software ,Linux,security,malware 2016-03-15 06:00 2KB www.computing.co.uk 18 Microsoft releases updated Windows 10 preview builds for phone and PC Build 14271 for the PC and Build 14267.1004 for mobile released to testers on the Fast Ring,Cloud and Infrastructure,Software,Operating Systems ,Microsoft,Windows 10 2016-03-15 06:00 3KB www.v3.co.uk 19 Bill Gates calls for tighter safeguards on bulk data collection Gates discusses the iPhone case, AI and the Microsoft Surface Book in his latest Reddit chat,Business Software,Privacy ,Microsoft,Bill Gates,Windows 10,Artificial Intelligence 2016-03-15 06:00 2KB www.computing.co.uk 20 Oracle’s 'traumatic' licensing methodology works, so it won’t change, says Specsavers global CIO It took Specsavers nine months to renegotiate a licensing deal with Oracle, but it didn't have to, says Phil Pavitt ,Licensing,Leadership ,Oracle,software licensing,SMB Spotlight,smb-services 2016-03-15 06:00 3KB www.computing.co.uk

21 Microsoft unveils Windows Defender Advanced Threat Protection service for enterprise customers Microsoft to add a post-breach layer of protection to the Windows 10 security stack,Software,Security ,Microsoft,Cyber security,Azure,Cloud,Windows 10 2016-03-15 06:00 3KB www.computing.co.uk 22 Met Office goes for CA API Management to deliver new web and mobile data services Big data and big business increasingly go hand-in-hand for the Met Office,Software,Public Sector ,Met Office,Charles Ewen,API,Department for Business, Innovation and Skills,Cray,XC40,Intel 2016-03-15 06:00 4KB www.computing.co.uk 23 Office 365 suffers European outage due to 'high resource utilisation' So - lag, basically,Business Software,Appliances ,Microsoft,Azure,Azure outage,Office 365 outage,SMB Spotlight,smb-services 2016-03-15 06:00 2KB www.computing.co.uk 24 HSCIC completes migration to NHS Spine 2 backbone New NHS Spine is 'the biggest public-sector IT system to be built entirely on open source software', claims HSCIC,Health,Open Source ,HSCIC,NHS 2016-03-15 06:00 3KB www.computing.co.uk 25 VR is here but embedded tech will truly transform its future HTC Vive and Oculus Rift offer great experiences, but the evolution of VR hardware and software is still at an early stage ,Gadgets,Hardware,Developer,Applications ,HTC,Oculus Rift,Samsung,Google,virtual reality,video games 2016-03-15 06:00 977Bytes www.computing.co.uk 26 GoPro and Microsoft sign licensing agreement REDMOND, Wash. — Feb. 5, 2016 — On Friday, Microsoft Technology Licensing LLC announced a new collaborative patent licensing agreement with GoPro Inc. for certain file storage and other system technologies. “This agreement with GoPro shows the incredible breadth of technology sharing enabled through patent transactions,” said Nick Psyhogeos, president... 2016-03-15 05:44 2KB news.microsoft.com 27 FileHippo News - powered by FeedBurner In the realm of science-fiction-becoming-fact, there have been a lot of innovations that left the pages of the book behind and became a reality. Video chatting, navigation systems, even the microwave oven were once relegated to the world of fiction, only to become seamless parts of our lives. And for... 2016-03-15 00:53 22KB feeds2.feedburner.com 28 Microsoft and Wistron deepen collaboration with Android patent licensing renewal REDMOND, Wash., and TAIPEI, Taiwan — March 7, 2016 — On Monday, Microsoft Corp. and Wistron Corp. announced a renewed Android patent licensing agreement covering Wistron’s tablets, mobile phones, e-readers, and other consumer devices running Android and Chrome platforms under Microsoft’s patent portfolio. This deal extends and expands a prior... 2016-03-15 01:44 2KB news.microsoft.com 29 Microsoft delivers enterprise-class ERP to the cloud REDMOND, Wash. — March 9, 2016 — Microsoft Corp. on Wednesday announced that its next-generation cloud ERP solution, Microsoft Dynamics AX, built on and for Microsoft Azure, is now available in 137 markets in 40 languages. The enterprise-class business application brings the power, speed and intelligence of cloud computing to... 2016-03-15 01:43 7KB news.microsoft.com 30 E-School for Girls partners with NYU and Microsoft for event NEW YORK — Feb. 4, 2016 — Pre-college entrepreneurship program E-School for Girls partnered with New York University, Microsoft Corp. and Natalie Zfat for an inspirational and educational event, What It Takes to Be a Successful Entrepreneur, on Feb. 3, 2016, at the NYU Stern School of Business. “Microsoft is... 2016-03-15 01:45 3KB news.microsoft.com

31 Ghanaian company sets up Bitcoin farm in Africa, claims to be first A pioneer of internet in Africa, Nii Quaynor, has announced the establishment of a Bitcoin producing farm on the continent. He claims that it is the first mining facility in Africa. 2016-03-15 02:30 1KB www.neowin.net 32 Acer unveils its first external mobile GPU dock powered via Thunderbolt 3 Acer has announced a mobile dock that houses an external mobile GPU dock that is powered through Thunderbolt 3 that provides discrete graphics powerhouse in a slim ultraportable form factor computer. 2016-03-15 02:14 1KB www.neowin.net 33 Did Amazon have a security breach? Probably not We've grown accustomed to security breaches, from Target to Home Depot and pretty much everywhere in between. It seems like daily news lately, but sometimes it seems companies are so hush-mouth that we just don't know. It's obviously in their best interest to not let word get out – bad... 2016-03-15 02:11 2KB betanews.com 34 accepting applications for open source Summer of Code 2016 If you are a college student, you probably look forward to the summer as a relaxing time away from learning. Yeah, I get it -- school can be very stressful, but sleeping late and vegetating won't result in meaningful growth. If you are a college student, you probably look forward to... 2016-03-15 00:48 2KB betanews.com 35 AMD and Sulon announce Sulon Q "all-in-one" AR/VR headset that runs Windows 10 You probably didn't expect it, but AMD is apparently stepping into both augmented reality and virtual reality at the same time, with a headset that can do both, so the company claims. 2016-03-15 00:22 3KB www.neowin.net 36 Upstream oil and gas companies spend smarter on digital technologies to drive value, reduce costs in downturn, Accenture and Microsoft survey finds HOUSTON — March 9, 2016 — As upstream oil and gas companies scrutinize every dollar invested, they’re spending smarter today on digital technologies, seeking to drive value and reduce costs amid low oil and gas prices, a new survey by Accenture (NYSE: ACN) and Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ: MSFT) reports. Respondents to the... 2016-03-15 02:04 6KB news.microsoft.com 37 Google may be bringing windowed apps to Android N Google has introduced a new split-screen multitasking feature in Android N, but that may not be an end to it. Documentation for the Preview shows support for a new "freeform" mode. 2016-03-15 00:00 1KB www.neowin.net 38 How to: Install Phoenix on Kodi Download one of the best add-ons for XMBC. 2016-03-15 00:00 1KB www.alphr.com 39 How to: Protect your email account Keeping your email account safe and secure is absolutely essential, and these top tips will keep your correspondence under wraps. 2016-03-15 00:00 5KB www.alphr.com 40 Microsoft will continue to accept Bitcoin in the Windows Store Contrary to yesterday's reports, it has become clear that Microsoft will continue to support adding money to an account by using the digital currency, Bitcoin. The earlier report was accidental. 2016-03-14 23:42 1KB www.neowin.net

41 Microsoft's Edge Extensions Preview website appears ahead of official release The official preview website for Microsoft's Edge Extensions has appeared online ahead of the announcement and release of extensions for Microsoft's latest browser, Edge. 2016-03-14 23:26 2KB www.neowin.net 42 Apple seeds iOS 9.3 beta 7 to developers and the public Apple has seeded the seventh iteration of the iOS 9.3 beta to both developers and to the public beta. Features of iOS 9.3 include Night Shift, password protection in Notes, and more. 2016-03-14 23:10 1KB www.neowin.net 43 A Glimpse at the Future of Containers in the Enterprise As interest in containers continues to grow, industry experts gathered at the Container Summit to discuss the technology and its future. 2016-03-14 21:54 1KB www.eweek.com 44 Anonymous launches OpTrump; declares war on Donald Trump Hacking collective Anonymous has launched its #OpTrump operation, in which it declares a 'total war' against US presidential candidate Donald Trump. They call for the shutdown of his campaign. 2016-03-14 22:54 1KB www.neowin.net 45 Blockai uses the blockchain to help artists protect their intellectual property While most of the discussions around blockchain have focused on its possible uses in finance, startup Blockai is looking at something different — helping.. 2016-03-14 20:16 2KB techcrunch.com 46 Trainline buys Captain Train for up to $189 million We hear a lot about how companies like are transforming car-based transportation, but today comes news of another play in the sector, this time covering.. 2016-03-14 20:16 5KB techcrunch.com 47 Phonvert has a plan to convert old smartphones into IoT nodes While many retired smartphones still work and have usable sensors like cameras, accelerometers, touch screens and bluetooth radios, large swaths of them.. 2016-03-14 20:16 1KB techcrunch.com 48 Watch us beat the heck out of each other in Disney’s new fighter, Marvel Battlegrounds Tomorrow morning Disney will launch Marvel Battlegrounds, a new four-player superhero fighting game built on top of their Disney Infinity platform. Disney.. 2016-03-14 20:16 4KB techcrunch.com 49 European Space Agency’s ExoMars successfully starts its journey to the red planet The first phase of ExoMars, an uncrewed Mars mission from the European Space Agency (ESA), successfully launched today from Baikonur, Kazakhstan. Lifting off.. 2016-03-14 20:16 3KB techcrunch.com 50 Validating adtech: Innovation is a stronger proof point than share price Adtech is in trouble because many firms have gotten the cold shoulder from venture capital. Supposedly. Another way to say that, of course, is that smart.. 2016-03-14 20:16 5KB techcrunch.com

51 Skype for Web upgraded, now supports dialing mobile phones, landlines and more Skype for Web, the browser-based version of Microsoft's popular communications software introduced last year, is getting a slew of new features that brings.. 2016-03-14 20:16 2KB techcrunch.com 52 Blooming measures your heart and brain to reduce stress at work Finnish startup Blooming is aiming to help stressed office workers re-take control of their lives, by using wearable tech to monitor and track stress levels,.. 2016-03-14 20:16 3KB techcrunch.com 53 Google loses Android antitrust appeal in Russia Google has lost an appeal in a Russian court against an antitrust ruling pertaining to its Android mobile OS. The competition complaint was brought against.. 2016-03-14 20:16 2KB techcrunch.com 54 #CSForAll: Ensuring tech access for all students On the heels of the White House Computer Science For All initiative (#CSForAll) announcement and the celebration of National Engineers Week, we are excited.. 2016-03-14 20:16 5KB techcrunch.com 55 Xbox Live now supports cross-platform multiplayer with PS4 At this point, there's very little difference between the Xbox One and the PlayStation 4. But there was one key differentiating point. Xbox gamers could.. 2016-03-14 20:16 2KB techcrunch.com 56 Google doubles max ChromeOS bug bounty to $100k After shelling out $2 million in rewards to security bounty hunters in 2015, Google today announced it's doubling the reward for revealing top security flaws,.. 2016-03-14 20:16 1KB techcrunch.com 57 Michael Goguen’s counter-complaint calls accuser an “exotic dancer” who was “looking for a payday” Michael Goguen, the longtime venture capitalist who was asked to leave Sequoia Capital following a stunning breach of contract complaint, has just filed a.. 2016-03-14 20:16 7KB techcrunch.com 58 Netflix pulls its Android Beta Program, says it was not meant for consumers to join Netflix confirmed this morning the existence of what appeared to be a new Android beta testing program, but says it did not intend to make it available to.. 2016-03-14 20:16 3KB techcrunch.com 59 Unlocking blockchain for the underbanked As 2015 came to a close and the new year began, many thought leaders in the financial technology space made their predictions on the trends and innovations.. 2016-03-14 20:16 7KB techcrunch.com 60 Google launches new services for Android game developers Google today announced a number of new services for game developers at its annual Developer Day at the Game Developers Conference. They include tools for.. 2016-03-14 20:16 3KB techcrunch.com 61 AMD shows off next-generation Polaris 10 GPU, architecture roadmap at GDC 2016 During AMD's GDC 2016 keynote, the company showed off a next-generation GPU from their upcoming Polaris line. Known as the Polaris 10, this new GPU is built using a 14nm FinFET manufacturing process, and fully supports emerging technologies like DirectX… 2016-03-14 20:15 1KB www.techspot.com

62 Cortana can be set as default SMS client in latest internal Windows 10 Mobile build According to reports, Microsoft is internally testing a Windows 10 Mobile build that will allow the user to set Cortana as the default SMS client. The internal build number is 14288. 2016-03-14 19:56 1KB www.neowin.net 63 John Oliver explains the Apple vs FBI fight in the way that only he can John Oliver chose the Apple vs FBI encryption battle as his topic for the latest Last Week Tonight. He discusses what's going on as well as the implications of it. Read on to watch the full video. 2016-03-14 19:32 1KB www.neowin.net 64 Icelandic Pirate Party leading in national polls A new poll suggests that if elections were to occur today, the Icelandic Pirate Party would secure 38.1% of the vote. Despite having the largest share, they would still need to form a coalition. 2016-03-14 19:18 2KB www.neowin.net 65 Russian court deals major blow to Google in anti-trust case regarding Android bundling The situation is getting worse for Google in a case regarding the company's anti- competitive practices in Russia, as a new court agrees with an earlier ruling that held Google guilty. 2016-03-14 19:02 2KB www.neowin.net 66 Multiple technology giants are working to strengthen encryption As tensions heighten in the ongoing San Bernardino iPhone encryption case, some of Silicon Valley's top technology companies are said to be bolstering their own security measures. 2016-03-14 18:45 2KB www.techspot.com 67 AMD announces Radeon Pro Duo graphics card alongside more VR initiatives As part of AMD's GDC 2016 keynote, the company has announced a brand new graphics card: the long-awaited Radeon Pro Duo with what appears to be two Fury-class Fiji GPUs on the one board. 2016-03-14 18:00 3KB www.techspot.com 68 Microsoft updates Skype for Web with new features including notifications, YouTube support Microsoft has delivered a range of new features to Skype for Web that it says its users have been asking for, including calls to mobiles and landlines, integrated YouTube playback, and notifications. 2016-03-14 17:50 2KB www.neowin.net 69 Microsoft unveils an all-new sharing experience for OneDrive.com Microsoft has unveiled a new sharing experience for OneDrive.com. The new experience provides a simpler and more minimalistic design, also bringing a few new features to the sharing process. 2016-03-14 17:34 1KB www.neowin.net 70 Microsoft cuts price of BLU Win HD LTE to $109 - but you can get it elsewhere for $89.99 Along with various other promotions, Microsoft has cut the price of the BLU Win HD LTE Windows phone, which is now available for just $109 on its Store - but it's available elsewhere for even less. 2016-03-14 17:02 2KB www.neowin.net

71 Numerex reports 4Q loss ATLANTA _ Numerex Corp. on Monday reported a fourth-quarter loss of $2.4 million, after reporting a profit in the same period a year earlier. The Atlanta- based company said it had a loss of 13 cents per share. Numerex shares have fallen 9 percent since the beginning of the... 2016-03-14 16:53 1KB www.cnbc.com 72 Xbox loves PS4: Cross-network play coming to Xbox One and Windows 10 The director of ID@Xbox, Chris Charla, has posted an open letter to the Xbox News blog, stating that cross-network play is coming to Xbox One and Windows 10, along with other new features. 2016-03-14 16:48 1KB www.neowin.net 73 Does closing all apps on your smartphone improve battery life? Android and iOS experts chime in Most semi-tech savvy smartphone users will tell you that closing all of the "open" apps on your device will lead to better battery life. As it turns out, the practice is little more than a common misconception according to Android… 2016-03-14 16:45 2KB www.techspot.com 74 Check out the official trailer for Automatron, the first Fallout 4 DLC Bethesda wants to make sure you don't forget about Fallout 4 anytime soon. The publisher on Monday released an official trailer for Automatron, the first of three announced expansion packs set to arrive in 2016. 2016-03-14 15:45 1KB www.techspot.com 75 Microsoft AIX: Using Minecraft To Build Better AI Microsoft is the latest tech titan to rely on a game to further development of AI. The company is open sourcing its newly minted AIX platform to researchers and AI enthusiasts. 2016-03-14 15:36 4KB www.informationweek.com 76 Microsoft to allow Xbox One, PC gamers to play online against PS4 owners Microsoft on Monday said it is enabling cross-network play on the Xbox One and Windows 10 meaning Xbox Live users may soon be able to play online multiplayer games against PlayStation 4 and other PC network users. 2016-03-14 14:45 1KB www.techspot.com 77 Microsoft is offering 31.4% off Dell's XPS 13 laptop to celebrate Pi Day For those who don’t know, today is National Pi Day (3/14). As a way of celebrating everyone’s favorite irrational number, Microsoft is offering a 31.4 percent discount on Dell’s XPS 13 2016 Edition laptop when bought from its store. … 2016-03-14 13:45 2KB www.techspot.com 78 Flash is rocketing into big-data analytics At one time, all-flash storage arrays were used for a single mission-critical application with a need for speed, usually in big IT shops. Now they're poised to take over many more parts of IT 2016-03-14 12:27 4KB www.infoworld.com 79 Brain boxes: Microsoft is using Minecraft to teach artificial intelligence Blockbuster game bolsters its educational credentials 2016-03-14 12:10 3KB www.techradar.com 80 New NPM will simplify React JavaScript development The Enclave module is currently being developed to provide a 'sane' API that's less reliant on Webpack 2016-03-14 11:44 2KB www.infoworld.com 81 Dropbox takes the reins, moves off AWS and onto its own infrastructure After years of relying on the Amazon cloud, Dropbox has begun using primarily its own technology instead 2016-03-14 10:23 3KB www.infoworld.com 82 Microsoft drops Bitcoin support for Windows 10 and Windows 10 Mobile purchases Microsoft's love affair with Bitcoin has proved to be short-lived. The company has updated its support pages to indicate that it no longer supports the cryptocurrency for purchases made in the Microsoft Store. Microsoft’s love affair with Bitcoin has proved to be short- lived. The company has updated its support pages... 2016-03-14 10:13 1KB betanews.com 83 80 percent of internet users believe privacy is a fundamental right People care more about their privacy than ever before according to the latest Consumer Openness Index by open source messaging and office productivity company OpenXchange, with 80 percent believing they have a right to privacy. People care more about their privacy than ever before according to the latest Consumer Openness... 2016-03-14 10:09 3KB betanews.com 84 Guest View: Pre-built testing comes of age Software testing is changing for the better with the rise of agile and DevOps. Instead of testing occurring at the end of the development cycle, modern methods integrate testing into every step of the process. By moving testing earlier, using Test-Driven Development (TDD), features can be released immediately after passing... 2016-03-14 09:00 3KB sdtimes.com 85 Only collaboration will solve the encryption dilemma “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety”. So goes the quote from Benjamin Franklin, one of the Founding Fathers of… 2016-03-14 08:38 6KB betanews.com Articles

85 articles, 2016-03-15 06:00

1 Microsoft accused of bundling new Windows 10 nagware into latest Patch Tuesday updates (2.00/3) Microsoft has been accused of sneaking new Windows 10 nagware into its latest slew of Patch Tuesday updates. First discovered by Woody Leonhard at InfoWorld , this month's KB3139929 security fix issued as part of Patch Tuesday has an unexpected surprise inside - KB3146449 - under the rather vague explanation of "several non- security-related fixes for Internet Explorer". It is the lastest in a growing number of updates from Microsoft masquerading as security patches, but which in reality amount to little more than nagware intended to badger users into upgrading to Windows 10 . The latest Windows-10-related update makes Microsoft's Internet Explorer web browser display a blue banner on the new tab page, which says: 'Microsoft recommends upgrading to Windows 10'. What makes it even more worrying, especially from a security point of view, is that it is not separated from a genuine Internet Explorer security patch - users have no choice except to uninstall the security patch or keep the ad-generating payload. Furthermore, KB3146449 doesn't appear in users' update history. The only way users can tell if they have got it is the banner appearing on IE and the only way of preventing it is not to install the security patch. However, only home users are affected. Corporate licences are exempt from the latest Windows 10 nagware. When Windows 10 was launched, with the offer of a free upgrade to users of existing Microsoft operating systems from Windows 7 and later, some commentators questioned the business model. Indeed, they labelled it "unsettling and Orwellian". In addition to bundling Windows 10 software and nagware into updates for Windows 7, 8 and 8.1, the company has also increasingly failed to disclose to users the nature of its patches and updates. Instead, it has provided only vague and, often, inaccurate summaries. Windows 10 itself also sends back vastly more telemetry data on users' PCs back to Microsoft. The company claims that it is anonymised, used purely for technical purposes and that no personal data is disclosed. However, many suspect that it is part of the business model for Windows 10. Computing has asked Microsoft for comment and will update the story accordingly when we get a response. Computing 's Enterprise Security & Risk Management Summit 2016 will be on 24 November 2016 in Central London. It is free to attend for qualified end users. The Cloud & Infrastructure Summit from Computing 's sister title V3 will be held from April 20-21 online . 2016-03-15 06:00

2 Western Digital releases affordable WD PiDrive 314GB HDD for Raspberry Pi (2.00/3) The Raspberry Pi line of computers are so much fun. By utilizing an OS-loaded memory card, it is easy to get started, making it a great project for young technology enthusiasts. But what if you prefer a larger mechanical hard disk drive to an SD card? Sure, you can leverage a USB variant, but they typically aren't designed for the Raspberry Pi. Today, Western Digital announces a Raspberry Pi- focused HDD, called the WD PiDrive 314GB. Yes, as you can probably guess from the name, the low-power drive features 314 gigabytes. "The WD PiDrive 314GB device is based on Western Digital's proven, high-volume 500GB platform with design changes made specifically for Raspberry Pi. Customizations made to the drive's magnetic recording and electrical system operating set- points align with Raspberry Pi's USB data and power design to reduce the electrical power load of the hard drive on Raspberry Pi, while still maintaining sufficient performance to deliver maximum USB data transfer rate. Platform design flexibility and the manufacturing tuning process enabled WDLabs to create this specialized product for Raspberry Pi efficiently without compromising quality and reliability", says Western Digital. The company further says, "WDLabs and the author of BerryBoot, a highly regarded, well- established and free software solution that simplifies the loading of multiple software applications, have created a special version of BerryBoot for WD PiDrive device customers, which includes software applications featuring the use of mass-storage devices with Raspberry Pi. Many operating systems and software applications can be stored on the WD PiDrive HDD, taking full advantage of the 314GB of storage. Upon system boot-up, the OS can be selected from the BerryBoot menu and launched with a couple of mouse clicks". While this all sounds cool, it is the price that makes it particularly intriguing. Western Digital quotes a price of $45.81, but the drive is getting a Pi Day-inspired discount of 31.4 percent, which brings it to a super-low $31.42. It is not clear how long the discount will last, so you should definitely act fast. Grab one here for the Raspberry Pi Model B+, 2 Model B, and 3. Will you buy the WD PiDrive 314GB for your Raspberry Pi? Tell me in the comments. 2016-03-15 01:16 By Brian

3 Q&A: Dinsmore sees open source Apache Spark moving to new stage Analytics software vet Thomas Dinsmore has tracked open source Apache Spark since it first emerged. In this Q&A, the independent consultant, based in Newton, Mass., sees a new level of maturity for the often-hyped data analytics platform. Spark may not be as fast as early benchmarks suggested, but it still bears attention, according to Dinsmore. He spoke to TechTarget shortly after the recent Spark Summit East 2016. You have followed Spark from the get-go. What is the take-away from this latest event? Thomas Dinsmore: There's an overall maturation of the Spark community. There is a greater sense that Spark has arrived, as opposed to "it's the next thing. " Whether it was last year's announcement that it would support Spark, or Hadoop distribution providers like Cloudera announcing that they would make it the default selection in their distribution, there is no need anymore to take a position that Spark is overhyped. Now, I think, it is a given that Spark is going to be a part of the future. Spark does seem to be entering another stage. Discussions have evolved from how fast it is to how to make open source Apache Spark faster yet. Dinsmore: Yes, you get a lot of contradictory information regarding speed. For example, a couple of years, ago folks were talking about Spark being "100-times" faster than MapReduce. But at Spark Summit East, IBM's Anjul Bhambhri [vice president, big data and analytics] said they are getting five- and six-times faster operations when IBM SPSS pushes down to Spark rather than MapReduce. Now, five-times faster is still a good thing, but it is not 100-times faster. When people talk about performance, you always have to frame it in terms of workload. Are we talking about a sort? A logistic regression problem? What is it we are comparing? I think you hear these numbers floating around -- but in terms of rigorous studies , I am seeing more along the lines of five- and six- times improvement versus "100 times" on MapReduce, in terms of, say, a sort. And we've recently seen from Hortonworks and the folks from HPE [Hewlett Packard Enterprise] that they have rewritten the [Spark] shuffle , and they are claiming "15-times" speedup. This is reasonable, given they are rewriting it in C++, but we will see. But all this is a sign of maturing. Instead of wild-eyed claims, we are seeing thoughtful benchmarks. In several ways, Hadoop greased the skids for Spark. Certainly, recent data analytics platforms tend to support open source, as Hadoop does. Dinsmore: First of all, there is no question that open source is becoming more pervasive in the enterprise stacks. And open source is part of the DNA of Hadoop. It is an essential part of the business model of Hadoop. Thinkers on disruptive technology will tell you it's not actually technology per se that disrupts industries, it's disruptive business models. Companies like Teradata aren't hurting because Hadoop is a new technology -- it's because Hadoop is a new business model, and it's a completely disruptive way for software to be developed and delivered. Because it is open source you have a much more rapid cadence of enhancements -- particularly when you have a community of the type that open source Spark has. It's grown rapidly because it has attracted contributors. IT organizations like open source partly because open source is easier to integrate. They can open it up, look at it, inspect it -- but also, if you've grown up in the Hadoop ecosystem, you simply expect open source. It's just the way it is. It is a completely different ecosystem from the data warehousing ecosystem where everything was strictly commercial. The freely available software means more people can download it and learn it. It goes beyond Hadoop and Spark. In the advanced analytics world, the reason the R language has become so popular is that in colleges, where they used to primarily use SAS, in the last 10 years colleges, universities, academic researchers and so forth have switched over to open source R. If you're a student, you can teach yourself R without having to pay out a lot of money. It does seem that SAS has realized this and has increased its support of college programs for analytics, at the same time, making its software more widely available. Dinsmore: It's true that SAS has introduced a university edition; it's a virtualized version of their software that is offered for free. But it is too little, too late. It's something that would have been good if they had done it 10 years ago. A community has grown up around R, and that community is very sticky. Once people get involved in an open source community, they have an almost negative reaction to commercial software. If you are a commercial software vendor, you are really going to have to prove that you are delivering something that is otherwise unavailable. 2016-03-15 06:00 Jack Vaughan

4 PCIe SSD roundup 2016: Some stall while others progress Computer Weekly’s 2015 review of PCIe SSD products focused on consolidation in the market. At the time, a range of acquisitions had taken place and some suppliers left the market altogether. In 2016, we see a divide between suppliers that continually evolve their server flash products and those that appear to have stalled in provision of updates to their offerings. HGST, SanDisk and Micron appear to have slowed their product releases and instead focused on other product ranges – such as traditional flash drives – or on developing base technology for their products, which is the case for Micron with 3D Nand and 3D XPoint on the horizon. The other suppliers in our survey have pushed on with products that deliver increased capacity and performance. Only Samsung appears to have evolved to use new technology, with the PM1725 and PM953 based on 3D TLC Nand. NVMe support isn’t consistent. Typically, only suppliers releasing products have moved to support the NVMe standard. There do, however, seem to be more products available using the M.2 format, including Sandisk’s X400 M.2 2280 at only 1.5mm thick. The PCIe SSD market doesn’t seem to have evolved as fast as the traditional drive-format market. This is presumably because PCIe SSD hardware had a significant price mark-up over their SAS / Sata -format counterparts. Therefore, customers are more likely to push these products until the end of their useful lifetime. The more widespread adoption of TLC flash may see this change, as it offers suppliers the ability to deliver products to a lower price/capacity point. This refresh may coincide with more suppliers releasing NVMe supported products, as they play catch-up with leaders such as Intel and Samsung. 2016-03-15 06:00 Chris Evans

5 Seven steps to becoming a digital business leader For more than a decade, business and IT have become increasingly inseparable and started co- evolving, and this unstoppable integration is altering the very nature of companies, competition and work. Along with globalisation, it is the defining economic transition of our time. To succeed in this world, senior executives must increasingly think digital first , while professionals and employees at every level must learn new skills and adopt new ways of working. Those who embrace this future will enjoy exciting career opportunities, but those who resist it will be increasingly marginalised. We see both patterns in many large organisations today. Nowhere is the impact of these forces greater than in the enterprise IT function. IT has always been among the most “ inside-out ” parts of the firm because developing and managing internal information systems has required – and still requires – a deep and sustained focus on the detailed nature of individual company operations and processes. This heads-down culture is so strong that companies often appoint dedicated business relationship managers (BRMs) who have the communications and consulting skills needed to keep IT’s efforts aligned with the overall goals of their firm. Although the need for traditional BRMs remains, to ensure their future relevance, they must become more than just effective internal business partners; they must also emerge as externally engaged digital business leaders (DBLs). The difference is one of orientation – while BRMs focus mostly on internal systems, processes and applications, DBLs primarily engage with the wider digital ecosystem: the startups, technologies, platforms and disruptive business models coming out of Silicon Valley and elsewhere. Finding the time, budgets, skills and bandwidth to make this inside-out to outside-in transition while still taking care of demanding internal work is the biggest and most difficult strategic challenge facing enterprise IT today. The following seven recommendations can help. 2016-03-15 06:00 David Moschella

6 Big data in big numbers - it's time to forget the 'three Vs' and look at real-world figures We have all heard the term "big data" but what does it mean - and what do we define as big? Many people try to define it in terms of size, although opinions vary; for some a dataset over a terabyte is... 2016-03-15 06:00

7 Oracle rushes out emergency patch to fix Java security flaw

Oracle has rushed out an out-of-band patch to fix serious security flaws in its Java client running on Windows devices. The patch was released late on Friday, with the issue explained in its Security Alert CVE-2016- 0603. The patch is intended to fix vulnerabilities in Java 6, 7 and 8 running on Windows. "To be successfully exploited, this vulnerability requires that an unsuspecting user be tricked into visiting a malicious website and download into the user's system before installing Java SE 6, 7 or 8," explained Oracle. It continued: "Though relatively complex to exploit, this vulnerability may result, if successfully exploited, in a complete compromise of the unsuspecting user’s system. " The flaw has received a CVSS Base Score of 7.6, which translates as "High". Oracle explained that customers with Java already installed are not at risk but that anyone installing the software should use the official website to avoid the risk of infection. "As a reminder, Oracle recommends that Java home users visit Java.com to ensure that they are running the most recent version of Java SE and that all older versions have been completely removed," the firm said. Qualys chief technology officer Wolfgang Kandek urged anyone installing Java in the coming days to be aware of the Oracle fix. "As Oracle points out, existing installations are not at risk. New installations should use the latest fixed packages published by Oracle," he said. "This would address the situation where an end-user might have visited a malicious site which could have prepared the machine for an attack by downloading altered versions of one of the DLLs [ dynamic link libraries] involved. " The fix comes around two weeks after Oracle issued its standard quarterly security update that contained 248 fixes. Oracle recently pledged to kill off Java plug-ins in a move that mirrors a pledge made by Adobe in December to phase out its much-maligned Flash browser plug-in. 2016-03-15 06:00

8 The Computing Vendor Excellence Awards 2016 – enter now! After last year's fantastic inaugural Computing Vendor Excellence Awards, we're back for 2016 and offering you another chance to pick up one of our coveted IT industry gongs. Open to all technology vendors in the enterprise IT space, the categories for entry range across a broad spectrum, from unified communications to DDoS mitigation; from business continuity to data visualisation. With 23 awards up for grabs, make 2016 the year you walk away with a trophy. The intense judging process - involving a crack team of top IT industry CIOs and Computing 's own technology experts - culminates in an unforgettable awards ceremony taking place at a glittering central London venue on the afternoon of 1 July, 2016. Last year's winners said picking up a Computing VEA was seen as a company's "most prominent award to date", a "tremendous endorsement" as well as a great way to "highlight how serious" a company is about serving customers in its chosen sector. The Computing Vendor Excellence Awards 2016 are now open for entries, and we urge you not to delay - the deadline for submitting your entry is 5pm on 22 April 2016. Soon after this date, a shortlist will be announced. Best of luck, and we do hope you'll be joining us on the day. 2016-03-15 06:00

9 Visa aims its secure payments tech at cloud-based banking apps Payments giant Visa is looking to venture deeper into the cloud and connected devices space by offering its tokenisation service to a wider range of banking services. It will offer its tokenisation services, which help secure digital and mobile payments, to banks that offer their customers apps that store payment credentials in the cloud. Sandra Alzetta, executive director of product enablement at Visa Europe, said the expansion of the Visa Europe Payment Tokenisation Service (VEPTS) is a response to the forecasted growth of more digital payment technologies . “By 2020, our projections are for one in five consumers to pay for items using their smartphone on a daily basis and for payments on mobile or tablet to account for more than 50 percent of Visa transactions,” she said. “Looking at contactless as an early indicator, where adoption has doubled and spend has trebled in the last year, we believe this projection could well be a conservative estimate. “By expanding our service to make tokenisation available to our client banks through a number of new technology partners, consumers will have access to all manner of fantastic new payment experiences accessible through their mobile phones, tablets and all manner of other ‘connected’ devices.” To capitalise upon this forecast, VEPTS will also be offered to secure payment features in wearable and connected devices, such as smartwatches. It can also be used to secure internet browser-based wallets and payment services specific to retailers through the Visa Checkout service, along with "card on file" payment options commonly used by major online retailers. Many people fear the security risks from hackers swiping credit card details when carrying out digital payments online or via mobile devices, but Visa’s tokenisation services enable payments without surrendering credit card details on the route between payee and bank. It works by substituting credit card details and account information with a series of numbers. These "tokens" are then submitted to a payment service and eventually translated by the customer’s bank to authorise the payment. The system means that no financially compromising numbers are transmitted by the payment app, device or online service, so even if hackers were able to swipe the token they would not be able to translate it into any usable information. This secure form of payment helps to support Apple Pay , which launched in the UK last year. Visa is keen to find new ways to facilitate secure payments having recently teamed up with security firm FireEye to launch a threat intelligence portal designed to combat financial crime . 2016-03-15 06:00

10 Oracle users warned over virtualisation software licence risks Oracle database users running their applications in a virtualised environment using third-party virtualisation software, such as VMware's, could be in "serious breach" of Oracle's software licensing rules - and potentially on the hook for millions in fines and extra software licences. That is the claim of Carl Davies, managing director at Tmaxsoft, which provides a "drop-in replacement for the Oracle database", and which therefore has a vested interest. "Nobody is suggesting that Oracle users - be they ISVs or end users themselves - are intentionally running in breach. It is simply not clear what Oracle's contractual position is in reference to virtualised hardware," said Davies. He continued: "Oracle permits some partitioning technology as a means of limiting the number of software licences required in virtualised environments but it can be unclear which methods are approved and it's easy to misinterpret and fall into non-compliance. "But ignorance is no defence once Oracle decides to audit an organisations' estate. The one sure result for non-Oracle Virtualisation Machine (OVM) users such as VMware will be significant cost and disruption, and once the audit is complete they will be given 30 days to become compliant again. " Complaints over software vendors' licence auditing programmes have increased as new software licence sales have fallen in recent years. It is not just Oracle that has been the target of user ire, but also Microsoft and SAP, among others. "To be clear, Oracle does publish an Oracle Partitioning Policy, which makes a distinction between hard and soft-partitioning," said Davies. "It prohibits the use of many of the most common virtualisation technologies as hard partitioning in order to limit the number of licences required, including Solaris 9 resource containers, AIX workload manager and VMware," he continued. "However this document has been far from widely publicised and, confusingly, explicitly states that none of these prohibitions can be included in any contract. Despite the fact that Oracle goes to great lengths to describe its partitioning policy, it goes on to suggest that this very policy will not form part of any agreement or contract. "This is obviously very perplexing and it isn't surprising that some customers are accusing Oracle of promoting misuse of its software to then report that same customer to be out of compliance. " Tmaxsoft has, in the past, accused Oracle of being heavy-handed in its software licence audits , and of coming down hard on users adopting virtualisation within their environments to make their hardware go further. 2016-03-15 06:00

11 Blockchain-as-a-Service and open-sourcing of platform code among a slew of blockchain announcements from IBM IBM has made a slew of announcements around blockchain technology, demonstrating its intent to get in on the blockchain boom that began with the emergence of the crypto-currency bitcoin a few years ago and which is now attracting the attention of governments , finance, manufacturing and many other sectors. A blockchain is a type of mutual distributed ledger (MDL). All transactions written to it are visible to all, shared peer-to-peer across multiple machines and impossible to alter or delete. Because of the total number of developers working on blockchain and related applications it has been described as "the biggest IT company in the world". However, many areas of development are still at an early stage , and despite its potential in other areas, most use cases still revolve around crypto-currencies. IBM has released 44,000 lines of code to the Linux Foundation's Hyperledger Project , a collaborative open-source endeavour that aims to promote a cross-industry open standard for the development of distributed ledgers. "As with any early-stage, highly complex technology that demonstrates the ability to change the way we live our lives and conduct business, blockchain demands a cross-industry, open source collaboration to advance the technology for all," writes Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation . IBM also announced a Blockchain-as-a-Service offering on its Bluemix cloud platform together with DevOps tools to allow developers to create, test and deploy blockchain applications in the cloud or on IBM z System servers. In addition, the firm's blockchain plans include its supercomputer-based Watson IoT Platform, which the company will deploy for Internet of Things applications including smart contracts - machine-to-machine transactions that are fulfilled automatically when certain conditions are reached. RFID information, barcode-scan events and other device-created data will be pulled together and used by blockchain-based ledgers to enable such smart contracts, IBM says. The company recently opened the Watson Internet of Things global HQ in Munich to drive cognitive computing research and develop the next generation of cognitive IoT apps, something that IBM has dubbed "Industry 4.0 innovation". The technology giant will also open a number of "IBM Garages" in London, New York, Singapore and Tokyo to hot-house the creation of business-oriented blockchains, and IBM Global Business Services will expand its blockchain consulting practice for clients in finance and logistics. The financial sector has become particularly interested in blockchain in recent months, seeing the technology as a way to increase the security of transactions, reduce fraud, decrease costs and provide an incorruptible audit trail. Among the blockchain partners listed by IBM is the London Stock Exchange Group. "We believe this technology has the potential to drive change across the industry but will need to be developed in partnership with customers and industry participants under an open-source approach," said Moiz Kohari, EVP, group head of technology innovation of the LSE Group. Interested in open source? Come along to the Computing Enterprise Open Source Summit in July. Registration is free for most delegates. 2016-03-15 06:00

12 Microsoft SQL Server to run on Linux with SQL Server 2016 Microsoft has made the surprise revelation that SQL Server 2016 will include a version that will run on Linux. The company has provided public preview releases of SQL Server 2016 since May last year, and the release candidate version was last updated at the start of this month. Microsoft will now herald the arrival of SQL Server 2016 with a Data Driven event in New York on Thursday, 10 March culminating in general availability of the platform later this year. But Microsoft has revealed that it also plans to release a version of SQL Server that will run on Linux, starting with the core relational database capabilities currently available in the private preview release. Full availability is slated for the middle of 2017. Bringing SQL Server to Linux will enable Microsoft to deliver a consistent data platform across Windows Server and Linux, as well as on-premise and cloud, according to Scott Guthrie, executive vice president for Microsoft's Cloud and Enterprise Group. "SQL Server on Linux will provide customers with even more flexibility in their data solution. One with mission-critical performance, industry-leading TCO, best-in-class security, and hybrid cloud innovations like Stretch Database, which lets customers access their data on-premise and in the cloud whenever they want at low cost, all built in," Guthrie wrote on the Official Microsoft Blog. Microsoft will face stiff competition in the Linux database market, as there are already a number of database vendors providing relatively mature relational database platforms. These include Oracle's MySQL, part of the widely used Lamp stack, plus MariaDB and EnterpriseDB , to name but a few. MariaDB has already become the database of choice for inclusion with Linux distributions, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux, although many of these are now lining up to praise Microsoft for bringing SQL Server to the platform. Equality drive However, it will take Microsoft some time to bring SQL Server for Linux up to feature parity with its Windows-based counterpart. The private preview of SQL Server on Linux currently has only the core capabilities, and those applying to join the preview programme will find that it is currently available only for Canonical's Ubuntu Linux or as a Docker image. "We are delighted to be working with Microsoft as it brings SQL Server to Linux," said Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth. "Customers are already taking advantage of Azure Data Lake services on Ubuntu, and now developers will be able to build modern applications that use SQL Server's enterprise capabilities. " Microsoft said that SQL Server on Linux will be based on SQL Server 2016, meaning that it should eventually have most if not all of the same features, including encryption capabilities and in-memory database handling as an option for all applications. 2016-03-15 06:00

13 Why bet365 is open sourcing its Erlang code The story of why bet365 has developed Erlang support libraries for the open source community begins with a challenge that is common in online businesses around the world. How do you scale your systems... 2016-03-15 06:00

14 Intel shoots for 3D broadcasting with Replay Technologies acquisition Intel is pushing into digital broadcasting, having acquired Israeli 3D video specialist Replay Technologies. The purchase is a natural extension of Intel's partnership with Replay, which began in 2013, and involved the two working on various 3D video projects. Their most recent project involved 360-degree broadcasts of the NBA All-Star Weekend, specifically in the Slam Dunk contest where basketball players pull off spectacular shots. The company's proprietary freeD 3D video rendering format uses 28 ultra high-definition cameras and computational power from Intel's servers to broadcast the contest in a way that provides a 360-degree view of the dunks. Wendell Brooks, president of Intel Capital, explained that the purchase of Replay will see Intel scale up the use of freeD to create what it call "immersive sports" for broadcasters and fans. "Immersive sports requires the high-performance computing Intel is known for, and it's also data driven, fuelling the continued build out of the cloud. For athletes, coaches, broadcasters and fans, the ability to capture, analyse and share data adds compelling new dimensions to the game," he said. "As part of Intel, the team will focus on growing their existing business and advancing their technology with Intel to deliver faster freeD processing and new features like the ability to manipulate and edit personalised content. " Intel's acquisition of Replay, for an undisclosed sum, is an attempt to further develop 3D broadcasting, and shows how companies are exploring the use of new digital technology and related hardware to provide enhanced services to customers and audiences. 360-degree broadcasts could, for example, provide web broadcasts in documentaries or travel programmes, while companies could showcase products, designs and even financial results in a more interactive and engaging way. The Amba Hotel in London's Marble Arch already does something similar with a virtual reality app and headset that allows potential clients to get an interactive tour of the hotel's facilities even if they are in a different country. IBM is another company exploring the use of cutting-edge digital technologies in traditional industries, and has created a Watson-powered robot concierge for a Hilton hotel . 2016-03-15 06:00

15 Opera to add native ad blocker to desktop web browser Opera Software - currently the subject of a $1.2bn takeover bid by a consortium of Chinese investors - is including an ad blocker in the latest version of its desktop web browser that, it claims, will speed-up page loading times by up to 90 per cent. The browser pioneer presented a series of comparisons with other ad blocker and browser combinations, finding that even the next best result, Firefox with Adblock Plus enabled, is still 21 per cent slower than Opera's integrated offering. “Advertising fuels the internet, allowing many services to be free for users. But, as our new research shows, most web pages today are significantly slowed down by bloated ads and heavy tracking. We don’t accept it. We want the web to be a better place for us all as users,” said Krystian Kolondra, senior vice president of engineering at the company and head of Opera for computers. The speed boost is achievable because ads are blocked at a web-engine level, meaning that it's the browser itself that controls page loading without having to make outside calls to plug-ins or extensions for each element. To really rub it in, Opera also includes a benchmarking tool to show users and developers just how much difference the tool makes. The debate over ad blocking is currently raging as people sick of unwieldy and performance- reducing advertisements are flocking to block, leaving webmasters struggling to find a business model that works. Ad blocking has increased 41 per cent year on year worldwide, and 98 per cent of blockers are used on PCs. Three announced recently that it is to become the first UK carrier to block adverts at a network level, while Apple has allowed ad blocker apps in the App Store for a year. Opera announced a new version of its mobile browser earlier this week that brings many of the 49 features, such as physical beacon recognition and Bluetooth interaction, bringing it into line with the current Chrome mobile edition. 2016-03-15 06:00

16 Google offers free Project Shield tool to help combat DDoS attacks Google is offering Project Shield, a tool designed to help websites withstand distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, free to sites that help uncover corruption and controversy. Using an intermediate reverse proxy server, Project Shield enables websites to re-route traffic through Google’s web infrastructure so that they can stay online even in the face of a major DDoS attack. The primary focus is on small sites that do not have the infrastructure to manage a DDoS attack , but Project Shield is also available to larger news and information-based organisations. Project Shield forms part of Google’s division, which aims to create products and services that "help people investigate corruption". “Project Shield welcomes applications from websites serving news. Human rights and elections monitoring [organisations] are also welcome to apply. We do not provide the service to other types of content, including gaming, businesses or individual blogs,” the company said. Websites need to give Google visibility into the traffic they receive to allow the firm to use an intermediate reverse proxy server that can distinguish malicious traffic from genuine visitors. This may be seen as an intrusion of privacy by some, but it is arguably better than having websites knocked offline. Google will keep the data for only two weeks, after which it will be added to an aggregated pool of anonymous data for analysis about potential future attacks. “Project Shield only uses the data we obtain (such as logs from the Project Shield servers) for DDoS mitigation and caching and to improve the Project Shield service,” said Google. The Jigsaw division has a Digital Attack Map that displays the tens of thousands of attacks directed at the websites of news organisations, businesses and charities to provide a better understanding of the raw data behind DDoS attacks. Jigsaw also has a Password Alert service that can warn journalists and activists if they enter their password into anywhere other than the account sign-in page. The idea is to avoid the password phishing attacks used by hackers. Google's Project Zero security research team, on the other hand, has the controversial objective of exposing flaws in the software of others, such as the glibc bug that exposed thousands of Linux apps and IoT devices to hacks . To hear more about security challenges, the threats they pose and how to combat them make sure you sign-up for the Computing Enterprise Security and Risk Management conference on 24 November . 2016-03-15 06:00

17 Linux Mint website hacked – operating system download replaced with backdoored ISO The Linux Mint website was hacked over the weekend and the regular ISO of the latest distribution of the popular operating system replaced by a version that contained a backdoor. The attack happened on Saturday February 20th, but the developers behind the operating system claim that it was cleared up by Sunday morning. Anyone who downloaded an ISO of Mint on the Saturday is advised not to use it. All users of the Linux Mint forums have also been advised to change their passwords. " We were exposed to an intrusion today. It was brief and it shouldn't impact many people ," admitted Clement Lefebvre, the head of the Linux Mint project in a blog post in the early hours of Sunday morning. "Hackers made a modified Linux Mint ISO, with a backdoor in it, and managed to hack our website to point to it. " He continued: "As far as we know, the only compromised edition was Linux Mint 17.3 Cinnamon edition. If you downloaded another release or another edition, this does not affect you. If you downloaded via torrents or via a direct HTTP link, this doesn't affect you either... It should only impact people who downloaded this edition on February 20th. " Lefebvre also provided advice on how to check whether a Linux Mint ISO might be affected, by checking its MD5 signature against the valid signatures. Intriguingly, the team behind Mint claim that they already have the name of three suspects they believe may have played a role - even if inadvertently - in the attack. "The hacked ISOs are hosted on 5.104.175.212 and the backdoor connects to absentvodka.com. Both lead to Sofia, Bulgaria, and the name of three people over there. We don't know their roles in this, but if we ask for an investigation, this is where it will start. "What we don't know is the motivation behind this attack. If more efforts are made to attack our project and if the goal is to hurt us, we'll get in touch with authorities and security firms to confront the people behind this," he concluded. 2016-03-15 06:00

18 Microsoft releases updated Windows 10 preview builds for phone and PC Microsoft has released updated preview code for Windows 10 on the PC at the same time as the Windows 10 Mobile version for phones. The releases come as Microsoft counts down an upcoming major update of Windows 10, codenamed Redstone. Both updates were pushed out overnight to testers signed up for Microsoft's Windows Insider programme, which the company uses to evaluate upcoming features before they are merged into the release code. Build 14271 for the PC and Build 14267.1004 for mobile were released to testers subscribing to the Fast Ring, which is updated the most frequently and thus showcases the newest features. For the most part, both updates largely comprise a number of bug fixes to previous preview releases, as Microsoft focuses on cleaning up the code in preparation for the Redstone release sometime in the first half of this year. Redstone will be the second major update for the Windows 10 platform on the PC, following last year's Windows 10 November Update. However, there are a couple of notable changes; starting with Build 14271 on the PC and going forwards, the setting that governs how frequently Windows will ask for tester feedback will be locked to automatic. Announcing the change on the Windows Experience blog , Gabe Aul, corporate vice president for Microsoft's Engineering Systems Team said that receiving feedback is a vital part of the Windows Insider Programme. "After each build upgrade or after certain activities, Windows will often ask for feedback. The answers to these questions are used by our engineering teams to understand how Windows Insiders feel about a particular experience or a particular build," he explained. "While we don't require Windows Insiders to answer these questions, we do hope they take the time to answer them so that we can better improve Windows for our customers," he added. Meanwhile, Windows 10 Mobile Build 14267.1004 delivers a new Visual Voicemail feature for dual-SIM devices such as the Lumia 950 XL , as well as fixing a serious bug in Build 14267 where users of the where the Lumia 550 found that their device would no longer charge or connect via USB. Visual Voicemail was showcased by Microsoft last year, and provides on-screen controls that enable users to listen to and manage voicemail without having to dial into their voicemail system. However, users of older Windows Phone handsets will be disappointed, as Microsoft recently began making preview releases available only for devices that shipped with Windows 10 Mobile, such as the Lumia 950, 950 XL, 650 and 550. Microsoft warned of some known issues with these latest preview releases, but which it is working to fix. Some PCs, for example, have been found to freeze or bluescreen when resuming from hibernation, and there is there is a known driver bug that prevents some commercial antivirus tools from operating as expected. Computing will be holding an Internet of Things Business Summit in London on May 12. Attendance is free to qualifying end users and places are already going fast. Visit the event page to peruse the agenda and to sign up 2016-03-15 06:00

19 Bill Gates calls for tighter safeguards on bulk data collection Microsoft founder Bill Gates has demanded more public debate around bulk data collection, stating that there are currently insufficient safeguards in place to ensure that the information is only used for the proper reasons. Gates made his comments in his third 'Ask Me Anything' session on web forum service Reddit . "I think there needs to be a discussion about when the government should be able to gather information. What if we had never had wiretapping? Also the government needs to talk openly about safeguards," he said. "Right now a lot of people don't think the government has the right checks to make sure information is only used in criminal situations. So this case will be viewed as the start of a discussion. "I think very few people take the extreme view that the government should be blind to financial and communication data, but very few people think giving the government carte blanche without safeguards makes sense. "A lot of countries like the UK and France are also going through this debate. For tech companies there needs to be some consistency, including how governments work with each other. The sooner we modernise the laws the better," he said. Gates also called for improved regulation around artificial intelligence, a hot topic given that a computer has recently beaten the world champion at board game 'Go' . "I think it is worth discussing [regulation] because I share the view of Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking that when a few people control a platform with extreme intelligence it creates dangers in terms of power and eventually control," he said. He also discussed his unsurprising use of the Microsoft Surface Book and Windows 10. "I just recently switched to the Surface Book. I only detach the screen a few times a week and I like the keyboard better than my previous Surface [and] I use the latest version of Windows - always updated Windows 10," he said. 2016-03-15 06:00

20 Oracle’s 'traumatic' licensing methodology works, so it won’t change, says Specsavers global CIO Oracle's approach to licensing has led to a 'traumatic' journey for Specsavers, according to its global CIO Phil Pavitt, who claims that the tech giant won't change the way it works. A damning report by the not-for-profit organisation Campaign for Clear Licensing (CCL) at the end of 2014 suggested that Oracle's customers are left "hostile and filled with deep- rooted mistrust" as a result of the tech giant's licensing and auditing processes - and indeed, it is an area that CIOs have been telling Computing that they're frustrated about for years, not just with Oracle, but with the likes of IBM and SAP too. According to Pavitt, Specsavers now has a good deal, but the firm had to go through six to nine months of "real trauma" to get to that deal. "We're happy with that deal, it wasn't easy to get to but we are now licensed appropriately. But at the end of the day, the journey was overly dramatic and traumatic and didn't need to be," Pavitt told Computing. "It is a real shame that their products are really good and unfortunately you can't do without them. But unfortunately the way they operate, it's just not a customer-focused way at all; their approach to the customer is minus the customer," he stated, adding that SAP and Oracle are both difficult to work with. Last year at Oracle Openworld in , the then CTO of the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA), Iain Patterson, suggested that the way Oracle licensing worked was about to change - as long as customers took a different approach to how they handle their licences. But despite both the DVLA and Specsavers renegotiating deals with Oracle, Pavitt doesn't believe that Oracle will change. "I don't believe that [Oracle will change]. At the end of the day they are a transaction-based organisation, they act like it, they sell like it, the gun-to-the-head methodology is selling. It's very powerful for them, there is no other methodology they've been trained in using and you have to get to very senior levels in the UK or the US to get any reasonable conversation about a reasonable deal - and that's not about discounting necessarily, it's about the right deal for the organisation," Pavitt said. This accords with Patterson's account that Oracle CEO Safra Catz was personally involved in the conversation to get DVLA a better deal. Pavitt believes that the likes of Oracle and SAP should really be coming to their customers to help them, but said because of their size, customers have to approach them instead. So what could force a change? "It won't stop; it hasn't changed for 20 years so why would it change? If the customers jointly stand up then perhaps they'll do something, but it'll never happen," he said. 2016-03-15 06:00

21 Microsoft unveils Windows Defender Advanced Threat Protection service for enterprise customers Microsoft has unveiled details of a threat protection service it is developing that, it claims, will help organisations detect and deal with attacks on their networks. Using a combination of endpoint and cloud-based tools, it is intended to detect threats that have made it past other defences and provide response recommendations. Due to be available later this year, Windows Defender Advanced Threat Protection is already being trialled by some early adopter customers as well as being used to protect Microsoft's own network, the company revealed. Full details have yet to be disclosed, but the service is likely to be incorporated into the Windows 10 Enterprise edition of Microsoft's operating system, and thus available only to volume licensing customers. The new service is being developed because of the increasing sophistication of cyber attacks mounted against corporate networks, and the damage that can be inflicted through lost productivity and loss or theft of confidential information. Microsoft claims that serious breaches cost the average organisation some $12m per incident, in addition to a broader impact on a company's reputation. "As the attackers' approaches have evolved and become more sophisticated, so too must our approach to provide security to our enterprise customers," said Microsoft's executive vice president for the Windows and Devices Group, Terry Myerson. He added that 90 per cent of IT directors responding to a survey said they needed a fully-fledged advanced threat protection solution that is capable of identifying attacks sooner and providing remediation. To address this, Microsoft is building Windows Defender Advanced Threat Protection around software built into Windows 10 endpoints feeding data back to cloud-based services to provide a global view of the threat landscape. The software giant said that Windows Defender Advanced Threat Protection is powered by a combination of Windows behavioural sensors, cloud-based security analytics, threat intelligence, and by tapping into Microsoft's "intelligent security graph". The latter is being developed to provide analytics on information drawn from more than one billion Windows devices. The service's security operations data provides an easy way to investigate alerts, explore the corporate network for signs of attacks, and to get detailed file footprints from across the organisation to recommend responses. It will also be able to examine the state of machines and their activities over the preceding six months for historical investigation purposes. One organisation involved in the trial is IT services supplier Avanade. "Cyber security is my biggest concern and securing all endpoints in my organisation is my current priority. Windows Defender Advanced Threat Protection is unique in that it can see exactly what's going on across every endpoint, which other solutions are failing to address," said Avanade's IT security director, Greg Petersen. Because Windows Defender Advanced Threat Protection is being built into Windows 10, it will be automatically kept up-to-date along with Windows itself. No on-premise server infrastructure or ongoing maintenance will be required, claims Microsoft. 2016-03-15 06:00

22 Met Office goes for CA API Management to deliver new web and mobile data services The Met Office is to use API Management software from CA Technologies in a bid to make it easier for the Met Office, as well as third parties, to deliver a wider range of online weather services to the web and mobile devices. As Ewen discussed with Computing this week , the Met Office's core "business" is becoming more complicated than ever, with the organisation tasked with disseminating forecast and climate data to more people and other organisations than ever before. Indeed, each forecast that the Met Office calculates today involves some 400GB per run. CA's software, therefore, is intended to help streamline the process by which the Met Office electronically shares data with partners, create new weather services, and improve the organisation's service to the public, regardless of how they choose to interact with the Met Office. Both cloud computing and mobile have increased demand for the Met Office's services, as well as expectations. But they also present new opportunities for the organisation to extend its reach and to increase revenues. Indeed, the burgeoning demand for detailed weather information from industry was the motivating factor behind systems giant IBM's recent acquisition of The Weather Company. The Met Office will be able to launch new mobile app-based services, aimed at both the public and organisations like the armed forces for the purpose of planning exercises, for example. They will also be able to provide more information to the energy, retail and other sectors where the weather can have a big impact. "The Met Office combines the latest science with ground-breaking advances in technology and local understanding to deliver operational advantage to our customers. We need to have the necessary knowledge, experience and flexibility to be able to apply our science across business and government to manage risks and opportunities as they arise from our weather," said Met Office CIO Charles Ewen. He continued: "CA API Management will underpin the next-generation of the Met Office services, allowing the organisation to safely share its data and applications with partners, developers, mobile apps and cloud services. " In addition to CA, the Met Office also worked with PC distributor and services company Computacenter on the implementation. Milko Van Duijl, senior vice president of UK and Ireland for CA Technologies, said that the software would "help power the next generation of digital services at the Met Office". He added:"CA's API Management software will enable the Met Office to monetise its weather and climate data, accelerate mobile services development, and grow the organisation. " The Met Office creates up to 3,000 tailored weather and climate forecasts, and briefings every day. It has recently upgraded its supercomputer estate from IBM to 140 tonnes of Intel-powered Cray XC40s. It uses APIs to bring together data from multiple sources, as well as helping to communicate and share information with third parties. The Met Office was established in 1854 as a small department within the Board of Trade, and issued its first gale warning in 1859. The Met Office today is organised as a "Trading Fund" within the Department for Business Innovation and Skills (BISS). That follows its transformation into an executive agency in the Ministry of Defence in 1990, and its transfer to BISS in 2011. See also : 2016-03-15 06:00

23 Office 365 suffers European outage due to 'high resource utilisation' UPDATE: Microsoft has issued Computing with the following statement, attributed to "a Microsoft spokesperson": "A limited number of customers in Europe may have intermittent access to email on mobile devices, or intermittent delays accessing the portal, and we're working to resolve both as quickly as possible," said the spokesperson, curiously focusing only on mobile when, to Computing 's knowledge, a number of types of device were affected. "Customers can access email via Outlook client or Outlook on the web and can visit the O365 Service Health Dashboard for updates," the spokesperson said. ORIGINAL STORY: Office 365 is experiencing a European outage, marking the second time in three months that Microsoft's critical enterprise systems are unavailable for a sustained period. The company has been quoted as attributing the problems to "high resource utilisation". Many users are unable to log into Office 365 through its front-end portal, resulting in perpetual lag, while the website promising that technicians are "working on it". If users are able to log in to services - for example Outlook - they are experiencing further lag inside the service environment when trying to open emails. Office 365 seems to have been inaccessible by those affected since around 9am this morning. Microsoft has made no formal announcement as yet, but Computing has been informed by a contact in the tech support industry that the company is blaming the problems on "high resource utilisation". Users on Twitter are reporting "multiple customers experiencing outages", and accusing Microsoft of "fix[ing] one thing and breaking another" . Computing has contacted Microsoft for a statement, and will update this story as and when we get one. Office 365's last major outage took place on 3 December 2015 , and also included Azure services. It lasted around four hours, and cloud email management firm Mimecast warned at the time that continued outages could begin to have "a detrimental impact on the country". A further outage took place on 18 December 2015 , and was attributed more directly to Microsoft's Azure functions. 2016-03-15 06:00

24 HSCIC completes migration to NHS Spine 2 backbone The Health and Social Care Information Centre (HSCIC) has completed the final phase of its move from the Spine backbone, which was created as part of the ill-fated National Programme for IT (NPfIT), to Spine 2. The Spine was part of the national infrastructure that stored patient information and enabled electronic messaging. It has been singled out by many as one of the few success stories of NPfIT , but as it went live more than 10 years ago, contracts with the suppliers who delivered it were about to end, necessitating some kind of revamp. HSCIC wanted the new Spine to be capable of processing significantly more data, enabling faster and more effective messaging and sharing between NHS organisations than ever before . As part of the upgrade to Spine 2, it has abandoned the original Spine's Oracle relational database and moved to open source platforms, such as the Riak NoSQL database from developer Basho. HSCIC claims that the new Spine is the biggest public-sector IT system to be built entirely on open source software. "We wanted to develop a service that HSCIC and developers could work with and adapt, to suit the needs of individual NHS organisations. The entire system is built on open source, freely available software, which makes it much easier to work with and develop," said Rob Shaw, director of assurance services at HSCIC. "The team working on Spine operate an agile working method, which makes it much faster to improve and change the service. We are all proud of what has already been achieved and excited to continue to develop the service in the future," he added. Another big shift is that HSCIC chose IT consultancy BJSS to work with it on the project, taking over a role previously held by BT. HSCIC said that it had taken the technological backbone of the NHS from a private company to in-house, public-sector management. "The usual practice for a big public-sector project like this has been to give the whole thing to a large supplier. We decided that we could manage and make improvements to Spine more flexibly in-house, and have worked with a number of specialist SMEs to successfully deliver our aims," said Shaw. HSCIC claimed that the 18-month transition project to the new Spine was achieved without disrupting the service it provides to 28,000 organisations, while simultaneously enabling the secure transfer of almost 150TB of data, including the demographic details of 80 million people. According to HSCIC, the system has saved £21m in its first year and saved the NHS 750 working days of time to date. Computing's Enterprise Open Source Summit is on 6 July in London. For more information, click here 2016-03-15 06:00

25 VR is here but embedded tech will truly transform its future Virtual reality (VR) is set to be everywhere in 2016. And for good reason. The HTC Vive went live for pre-orders just a few days ago and was snapped up by 15,000 early adopters despite the eye-watering... 2016-03-15 06:00

26 GoPro and Microsoft sign licensing agreement REDMOND, Wash. — Feb. 5, 2016 — On Friday, Microsoft Technology Licensing LLC announced a new collaborative patent licensing agreement with GoPro Inc. for certain file storage and other system technologies. “This agreement with GoPro shows the incredible breadth of technology sharing enabled through patent transactions,” said Nick Psyhogeos, president of Microsoft Technology Licensing. “Microsoft’s licensing of personal wearable technologies is seeing strong demand as we partner with companies from all industries to optimize solutions for their customers around the globe.” The terms of the agreement are confidential. Microsoft’s commitment to licensing IP The patent agreement is another example of the important role intellectual property (IP) plays in ensuring a healthy and vibrant technology ecosystem. Since Microsoft launched its IP licensing program in December 2003, it has entered into more than 1,200 licensing agreements. More information about Microsoft’s licensing programs is available at http://www.microsoft.com/iplicensing . About GoPro Inc. GoPro, Inc. is transforming the way people visually capture and share their lives. What began as an idea to help athletes self-document themselves engaged in their sport, GoPro has become a standard for how people capture themselves engaged in their interests, whatever they may be. From extreme to mainstream, professional to consumer, GoPro enables the world to capture and share its passion in the form of immersive and engaging content. About Microsoft Technology Licensing Microsoft Technology Licensing LLC was formed in 2014 to acquire, manage and license Microsoft’s patent portfolio. About Microsoft Microsoft (Nasdaq “MSFT” @microsoft) is the leading platform and productivity company for the mobile-first, cloud-first world, and its mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. 2016-03-15 05:44 By Microsoft

27 FileHippo News - powered by FeedBurner In the realm of science-fiction-becoming-fact, there have been a lot of innovations that left the pages of the book behind and became a reality. Video chatting, navigation systems, even the microwave oven were once relegated to the world of fiction, only to become seamless parts of our lives. And for many people, the self-driving car is the next item on the “make it so” list. That vision is already quickly becoming a reality, and the announcement that GM has bought a small software company, Cruise Automation, means the automaker is one step closer to releasing autonomous vehicles. While GM has already been at work in research and development for self-driving cars, Cruise Automation has something (besides just software) that the automaker needs: permission. There are currently very few locations where developers can test a self-driving car in the real world of human traffic, and even in those locations there are necessary permits. The acquisition of Cruise Automation affords GM the ability to test its vehicles under actual driving conditions thanks to the software company’s permits. The testing stage is still quite obviously a work in progress, and a number of manufacturers have reached the real-world driving process with their vehicles. One of the other obstacles in the race for self-driving vehicles–which even auto manufacturers have stated are safer than human drivers–is the wide variety of conditions that can interfere with the car’s cameras. These cameras are what enable the vehicle to maneuver, but in heavy rain, dust storms, snow, and other unsafe conditions, the car can literally cease operation. GM’s purchase of the software company, which will absorb all of its forty employees into a separate project in the car maker’s autonomous vehicle division, allows it to continue to work on the safety response aspect that is so crucial to the success of launching these vehicles for consumer use. The post GM Buys Self-Driving Auto Software Developer appeared first on FileHippo News . It took four matches, but a human has finally done what many experts first thought was a certainty, then fairly impossible, and now mind-boggling: world champion Lee Sedol has finally beaten Google’s AI software AlphaGo in the ancient Chinese strategy game Go. In the five- match scheduled event, the first three matches went to Google DeepMind division’s software; in the fourth match, the human world champion finally won. The game itself has a nearly-infinite number of possible moves, and therefore relies on intuition and emotional state to help the Go master defeat his or her opponent. This lack of “feel” for the game is what had so many game players predicting an easy win for the human player. But the very first matchup showed something that gave the software a leg-up, and that was an inability to second-guess himself due to an early mistake. Both players in the first game made crucial early errors, but unlike the human player, AlphaGo couldn’t experience self-doubt or embarrassment at his own mistake, something that commentators attributed to the machine’s win. In the fourth match, held yesterday in Seoul, it was three hours into the game before it looked as though Sedol might win this one. Part of AlphaGo’s arsenal of game-winning strategies is an ability to correct itself for future moves through trial and error; once the software makes a move and sees the resulting outcomes, that information is stored in order to be called on when needed later. This entire project has been an interesting look at how far AI software has come, as well as how far the technology still has to go. While others speculate on what possible abilities DeepMind can come up with next for its software, the bigger picture is this: AI and human interaction stands to be an ongoing partnership. The days of having computers take over all aspects of mission- critical thought processes are obviously not coming soon, but humans paired with AI software may be unstoppable. Interestingly, the five-match series–which was broadcast live on YouTube and aired on local channels–included a $1 million prize for the winner. As AlphaGo has already won three matches, the software is officially the prize winner. Software tends not to spend its money wisely, and therefore AlphaGo’s winnings will be donated to charity. The post Man vs Machine: Sedol Finally Beats Google’s AlphaGo appeared first on FileHippo News . The rapid growth of Locky has seen its reported use grow at a faster rate than was expected, causing surprise to some security experts, and has now become the second most seen form of ransomware currently doing the rounds. Apple Mac owners have also been warned that their iOS based machines are now just as likely to fall prey to the latest strain of ransomware. Some experts have stated that the sheer increase in volume of the number of reported cyber- attacks seeking to extort users has increased greatly since the start of 2016. It first of all installs itself quietly, hoping to avoid detection, and then encrypts all the data on the infected machine, and then demands a payment from the unsuspecting user, before providing the user with a decryption key. If there is honor among thieves, then the key will normally un-encrypt a user’s details. If they are not however, then the user will remain locked out from their equipment, and also down a substantial amount of money. At the time of writing, Locky is asking for 3 bitcoins, which is in around $900-$1000. What is Ransomware? Ransomware is malicious code that gets into a computer or a server and disables access to files by encrypting (or locking) them. The code then presents the computer user with a demand to pay a ransom to unlock the files. The post Locky Rides Crest Of Global Ransomware Surge appeared first on FileHippo News . The allegations were made using Google’s Google+ social networking platform, and also on . When the reviews claiming that infants were not safe in the nursery were found by the small business, the owners originally approached Google and asked them to remove the offensive and untrue content. But the search titan refused to do so, using the argument that the posted material came under the auspices of freedom-of-speech, and therefore they were not obliged, or could find a justification for removing them. The unnamed nursery’s lawyer told TechCrunch that: “The judge balanced the interests of privacy against the interest of reputation (of this nursery). However, it considers the interests of protecting the reputation more important than the interests of Google to the interest of privacy of the Google Reviewers.” Speaking after he made his ruling, the judge in the case, CM Berkhout, differed substantially with the US firm’s point of view, instead finding that the reviews were indeed fake and damaging. He ordered Google take down the reviews. Berkhout also made a provision in his ruling that Google would have to provide details about the reviewers so that the nursery could, if it so wished, face the posters of the reviews and allegations in court. He said afterwards: “In my opinion, it was stunning that Google allowed this, as the practice of using someone else’s profile picture without consent is unlawful and infringing on portrait rights… and it only helps fake reviewers to hide behind a ‘trusted face.’ Hopefully, this decision will make Google rethink their own policies and the way they enforce their policies.” Google’s response was characteristically brief , utilizing their normal brevity in matters that have gone against them: “We’ve received the ruling and are currently reviewing it.” The post Dutch Court Orders Google To Hand Over Fake Reviewers IP Addresses appeared first on FileHippo News . It seems like you can’t do anything these days without dealing with the bureaucracy of it all. Forms to fill out, regulations to follow, miles and miles of red tape…and of course, the ever- present and usually outdated technology. Everyone from schools to retailers to even the government has to suffer under the weight of policies and procedures. Unless you’re a terrorist organization, in which case you can apparently toss all your information on a memory stick and leave it lying around an office somewhere. That’s the case with an ISIS faction, at least, and the end result was the loss of 22,000 registration forms for its members after a memory stick with the information was taken from the office of their head of security. These forms contained names, addresses, birth dates, phone numbers, even blood types on individuals who’d been recruited or volunteered for the terror organization. According to the Guardian , “The documents, thought to be from a border crossing into Syria , are questionnaires of each would-be recruit. There are 23 questions, including names, date and place of birth, hometown, telephone number, education and blood type.” Two different sources both claim to have possession of the information. A German intelligence agency acquired the forms, and Sky News reports being given the unencrypted memory stick after it was stolen by a former member who became disillusioned with the terror network’s practices. While security watchers were aware of a number of the names on the registration forms, there were also more than a few surprises. What is known is there were specific numbers of US, UK, and Canadian citizens who’d signed on to join ISIS’ efforts. Members from more than forty different countries were included in the leaked data. As with any data breach, the real concern now is what happens with the information. In a standard consumer data breach, citizens have to worry about monitoring their credit reports for any signs of suspicious financial activity; it’s not hard to imagine what the repercussions will be after handing over the names and addresses of known ISIS members and their families to the government. The post ISIS Struck By Internal Data Breach appeared first on FileHippo News . At more than a trillion dollars and what sometimes seems like a trillion glitches, and a trillion bad headlines, the latest issue with the F-35’s software has been found in the software responsible for the Radar it uses. The solution however is quite simple and straightforward, and one that IT Support staff have relied upon for years to solve problems in first line troubleshooting: Turning it off, and then on again. In the latest publicly released report on the joint strike fighter, US Air Force major general Jeffrey Harrigian states that: “What would happen is they’d get a signal that says either a radar degrade or a radar fail— something that would force us to restart the radar.” The latest report into the troubled development of the new fighter jet has been described as damning, listing as it does a multitude of deficiencies that seem to routinely being found as development of the fighter plane creeps ever closer to deployment. Many of the failures causing headaches for the US military and its designers is the fact that many of the issues are primarily due to buggy software. Not as crazy as it sounds It really isn’t. The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, built by Lockheed Martin, is currently one of the most advanced and heavily software-driven warplanes ever designed and built. It is therefore also one of the most complicated and difficult IT projects ever undertaken. But it’s not just the software and onboard computer systems that Lockheed Martin have struggled with. The plane has also struggled with its apparent vulnerability to lightning strikes, landing gear issues, weight issues, and bomb bay door faults, depending on climatic issues in the hotter areas of the world. Hacker proof? Apparently not. The F-35 has yet to undertake any serious cyber security testing, something that could be a real possibility with cyber warfare an increasing threat across the world. something that has caused concern among buyers who have the joint strike fighter on back order, including branches of the US military, and the United Kingdom The latest Pentagon report quoted above stated that glitches were found … “…in fusion, electronic warfare, and weapons employment result in ambiguous threat displays, limited ability to respond to threats, and a requirement for off-board sources to provide accurate coordinates for precision attack.” Speaking to the Guardian newspaper , Keith Joiner, the man responsible for the final evaluation for procurement by the Australian Defence Force, said that “the only system that has done cyber security, vulnerability and penetration testing is the logistics software. So ordering spares. And it didn’t go very well.” The post F-35 Radar: Have You Tried Turning It On And Off Again? appeared first on FileHippo News . Google’s DeepMind division has pulled off an unforeseen victory that goes far beyond the rules and strategies of any game. Its AI software AlphaGo, which made headlines for its pending match-up against the reigning world champion of the ancient Chinese strategy game Go, has now defeated its human opponent in the first of five scheduled games. South Korean Lee Sedol has long been considered the world’s Go master, even from his prodigy status as a professional player at age twelve. His loss on Wednesday was a shock to both game fans and AI experts, who’d originally predicted that the complexities and required human emotional aspect of the game would mean artificial intelligence would require years of fine tuning in order to beat a human opponent at this level. Interestingly, the factor that may have most helped AlphaGo defeat Sedol could be those same human emotions that critics argued are vital to winning the complex game. Reportedly, both the software and the human player made critical mistakes early in the game, but unlike a human opponent, AlphaGo was unhindered by its error and (oversimplifying things, here) simply readjusted its strategy. That ability to remain emotionally detached from a mistake–something that could easily cause a human player to overadjust or question every further move–could have played a role in the software’s strategies moving forward. While Sedol has been very gracious about what many experts predicted would be a non-event, Google’s DeepMind has got to be ecstatic. Its “reinforcement learning” concept has meant that AlphaGo has a mechanism other AI attempts haven’t had, and that’s the ability to teach itself through intense trial and error. That innovation has certainly proven itself worthy for now, but there are still four more Go matches ahead of it. The post Game-Changing Victory For Google’s AI Software appeared first on FileHippo News . “Today I’m excited to announce that I’ve joined Google.” Commonly known as “moot” online, Poole began building the 4chan site in 2003 at the tender age of just 15. In the 12 consecutive years, he turned his bedroom enterprize into a 22 million active user image-sharing community with topics that were as diverse as pictures of cute kittens to hardcore porn. The idea behind the channel was that it was all anonymous. While 4chan was a winner for online freedom of expression, it also led to the common association with 4Chan and offensive and abusive material. It was also widely credited as being the epicentre of 2014’s leaking of images of nude celebrities following the now famous hack of Apple’s iCloud service. The incognito 4Chan however also served as a focal rallying point for online activism from groups such as Anonymous, and others. RickRolled The diverse and often anarchically themed 4chan community was also responsible for some the web’s more memorably popular and creative memes over the years, including both LOLcats, and the it was funny once, Rickrolling phenomenon that at one point seemed to dominate virtually every YouTube video going. In September 2015, 4chan was sold to a Japanese entrepreneur. Impressed “When meeting with current and former Googlers, I continually find myself drawn to their intelligence, passion, and enthusiasm — as well as a universal desire to share it with others. I’m also impressed by Google’s commitment to enabling these same talented people to tackle some of the world’s most interesting and important problems.” Chris Poole retired as administrator of 4chan back in January 2015. While no details of his actual job role have been released or confirmed, other than that he has been hired by Google, he is expected to be involved with the social networking side of Google, an area where the browser giant has failed to compete with the likes of Facebook, et al. “I can’t wait to contribute my own experience from a dozen years of building online communities, and to begin the next chapter of my career at such an incredible company.” The post Google hires 4chan Creator appeared first on FileHippo News . A spokesperson for the Raytheon Company, Mike Doble, where Tomlinson still worked as a principal scientist said that Tomlinson was a… “true technology pioneer… the man who brought us email in the early days of networked computers.” Tomlinson was one of the early inductees to the Internet Hall of Fame, with his biography on the site stating that his invention of the modern style email program was: “…a complete revolution, fundamentally changing the way people communicate, including the way businesses, from huge corporations to tiny mom-and-pop shops, operate and the way millions of people shop, bank, and keep in touch with friends and family, whether they are across town or across oceans. Today, tens of millions of email-enabled devices are in use every day. Email remains the most popular application, with over a billion and a half users spanning the globe and communicating across the traditional barriers of time and space.” Tomlinson created and amended the protocols that allowed him to send the first email in 1971, on the ARPANET system. ARPANET was a computer network created for the US government that is widely considered as an essential forerunner to the internet. “I chose to append an at sign and the host name to the user’s (login) name. I am frequently asked why I chose the at sign, but the at sign just makes sense. The purpose of the at sign (in English) was to indicate a unit price (for example, 10 items @ $1.95). I used the at sign to indicate that the user was ‘at’ some other host rather than being local.” Ray Tomlinson was the recipient of several awards for his work and held electrical engineering degrees from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and MIT. He is also ranked number 4 on the MIT list of the top 150 innovators to have studied at MIT. He began work for Bolt Beranek and Newman, known as BBN, in 1967. When the company was later aqquired by Raytheon Co, Tomlinson stayed on. The post Ray Tomlinson, Inventor Of Email, Passes Away @ 74 appeared first on FileHippo News . You know what’s missing from your workday? Losing access to a number of your key files after accidentally downloading some ransomware. Nothing makes the day go smoother than receiving a message, telling you to pay the Bitcoin ransom if you want to get your files back. Unfortunately, that was the reality for some users who’d downloaded Transmission BitTorrent Installer. This software for MacOS X (Linux version available, bundled with Ubuntu) doesn’t take up a lot of space so it runs in the background to install torrents quickly. It can even be operated remotely via the web. Sadly, versions of the software that were downloaded anytime on March 4th and 5th may have also been infected with KeRanger ransomware. First discovered by Palo Alto Networks, this ransomware was found on two versions of Transmission 2.90. Since Transmission is a fully open-source project, the researchers have speculated that the download website itself was compromised. According to their post on KeRanger by Claud Xiao and Jin Chen, the ransomware encrypts individual files to lock you out of them, a process that they’ll undo for a fee. The encryption process itself is pretty slick: “To encrypt each file, KeRanger starts by generating a random number (RN) and encrypts the RN with the RSA key retrieved from the C2 server using the RSA algorithm. It then stores the encrypted RN at the beginning of resulting file. Next, it will generate an Initialization Vector (IV) using the original file’s contents and store the IV inside the resulting file. After that, it will mix the RN and the IV to generate an AES encryption key. Finally, it will use this AES key to the contents of the original file and write all encrypted data to the result file.” But be warned: further investigation into the mechanism behind KeRanger uncovered an alarming feature, namely that it looked like there were processes involved that hadn’t been completed. Undetected, it’s possible these features could have been activated at a later date. “It seems like KeRanger is still under development. There are some apparent functions named ‘_create_tcp_socket’, ‘_execute_cmd’ and ‘_encrypt_timemachine’. Some of them have been finished but are not used in current samples. Our analysis suggests the attacker may be trying to develop backdoor functionality and encrypt Time Machine backup files as well. If these backup files are encrypted, victims would not be able to recover their damaged files using Time Machine.” Fortunately, Transmission’s developers have released a new version that fixes this vulnerability. For those who may already have been infected, Palo Alto Networks has complete clean up instructions here. The post Transmission Installer Update Fixes Ransomware Flaw appeared first on FileHippo News . 2016-03-15 00:53

28 Microsoft and Wistron deepen collaboration with Android patent licensing renewal REDMOND, Wash., and TAIPEI, Taiwan — March 7, 2016 — On Monday, Microsoft Corp. and Wistron Corp. announced a renewed Android patent licensing agreement covering Wistron’s tablets, mobile phones, e-readers, and other consumer devices running Android and Chrome platforms under Microsoft’s patent portfolio. This deal extends and expands a prior Android intellectual property (IP) license between the companies. “We’re looking forward to continuing to enhance consumer experiences through our renewed and strengthened partnership with Microsoft,” said Eric H. Ma, head of Wistron’s Legal Division. “Combining access to Microsoft’s cutting-edge technologies with Wistron’s impressive engineering capacity is a powerful recipe for improved customer solutions,” said Nick Psyhogeos, president of Microsoft Technology Licensing. “Our partnership with Wistron highlights the kind of opportunities created through mutual respect and alignment on intellectual property.” Microsoft’s commitment to licensing IP The patent agreement is another example of the important role IP plays in ensuring a healthy and vibrant technology ecosystem. Since Microsoft launched its IP licensing program in December 2003, it has entered into more than 1,200 licensing agreements. More information about Microsoft’s licensing programs is available at http://www.microsoft.com/iplicensing . About Wistron Corp. Wistron Corporation is a Fortune Global 500 company and a Technology Service Provider supplying ICT (information and communication technology) products, services and systems to our global customers. We are devoted to increasing the value of our services through developing innovative solutions in the areas of display vertical integration, cloud and green recycling. For more information, please visit: www.wistron.com . About Microsoft Technology Licensing Microsoft Technology Licensing LLC was formed in 2014 to acquire, manage and license Microsoft’s patent portfolio. About Microsoft Microsoft (Nasdaq “MSFT” @microsoft) is the leading platform and productivity company for the mobile-first, cloud-first world, and its mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. 2016-03-15 01:44 By Microsoft

29 Microsoft delivers enterprise-class ERP to the cloud REDMOND, Wash. — March 9, 2016 — Microsoft Corp. on Wednesday announced that its next-generation cloud ERP solution, Microsoft Dynamics AX, built on and for Microsoft Azure, is now available in 137 markets in 40 languages. The enterprise-class business application brings the power, speed and intelligence of cloud computing to people and organizations to achieve more. “Customers from around the world are using the cloud in incredible ways to accelerate and transform their business,” said Scott Guthrie, executive vice president, Microsoft Cloud and Enterprise. “Today’s release is an exciting milestone extending Microsoft’s business cloud offerings. It’s now possible for organizations to run their entire business in the cloud with Microsoft — from productivity with Office 365, to business analytics with Power BI and Cortana Analytics Suite, customer engagement with Dynamics CRM and business operations with Dynamics AX.” Customers across the globe are already using Dynamics AX to run their business processes in the cloud — from single domains like human resources and manufacturing to end-to-end business. Companies already live in production include Hagler Systems , Haldex , Icon , Renault Sport Formula One Team , Priva , Smiles , Travel Alberta and Umbra Group. The new Dynamics AX moves beyond traditional business solutions and brings ERP, business intelligence, infrastructure and database services together in a single offering, empowering organizations to run industry-specific and operational business processes that are extendable with specific solutions from partners. Wednesday, Microsoft announced more than 50 ISV solutions that are available on the Azure Marketplace. These Microsoft-curated, pre-configured industry and vertical solutions help customers discover and implement the solution they need quicker than ever before and, like Dynamics AX, enable fast consumption of updates and improvements. In addition to the 50-plus solutions already available, hundreds are in development today. The new Dynamics AX takes the capabilities of Lifecycle Services (LCS) to the next level. Businesses will be able to combine the best practices for their mission-critical apps with the flexibility and simplicity of upgrade via the cloud. With LCS, Dynamics AX will formalize the concepts of development, test and production, making the ongoing upgrade quicker to implement and deploy and easier to manage. “Lifecycle Services represents a shift in how companies manage the life cycle of an ERP system in a way that’s never really been done before,” said Josh Greenbaum, principal analyst, Enterprise Application Consulting. “The ability to test in the cloud and use the cloud’s natural elasticity and functionality to take the test, flip a switch and make it the actual production environment, that truly is magic.” Harnessing the power of the Azure cloud, Dynamics AX provides enhanced security along with global availability and scale, enabling businesses and people to work more safely anywhere, anytime while respecting the data sovereignty requirements of global customers no matter where in the globe they operate. “We do everything through Dynamics AX now; we manage virtually all of our operations,” said Thomas Mayer, chief operating office, Renault Sport Formula One Team. “Having what I need to run my business available anywhere in the world is invaluable.” “We are bringing massive amounts of data into our business to help control building climates and horticulture environments. That is a huge business transformation, and the cloud was the only way forward for us to make that real,” said Paul Ossewold, vice president, Digital Operations, Priva. “To manage our company with 10 offices around the world, we need systems that are fast. That is what Dynamics AX in the cloud is giving us, and we couldn’t be more excited to be one of the first customers on board to take advantage of this new solution.” Modern solution for modern businesses Dynamics AX delivers a simple, beautiful, and modern user interface that is touch-enabled for the devices people use today. People can interact with the system with ease, as Dynamics AX works like other Microsoft applications that people are used to, increasing adoption and usage. The new intelligent user experience is also optimized to deliver value to organizations through the ability to make smarter decisions with increased speed. “ERP is core to our business operations and critical to building and delivering products to our customers,” said Ben Hagler, co-founder, Hagler Systems. “We chose Dynamics AX because of its robustness. The UI is amazing and available anywhere. It makes us device-independent. We can get work done everywhere with increased speed.” Dynamics AX delivers the proven business logic of a complete business suite, enhanced with new constructs such as Workspaces that provide a collaborative canvas unifying key performance indicators, business intelligence, views of critical data, processes and actions to power business user productivity. The Financial Period Close Workspace, for example, dramatically streamlines this critical, complex process. Software vendors that partner with Microsoft have expressed their excitement over the potential this new solution offers the industry, representing a turning point in the ERP industry as cloud ERP solutions are adopted by customers to run their business-critical operations. “This release is further proof that Microsoft is leading the charge with innovations not just in ERP but in cloud,” said CEO Peter ter Maaten from Microsoft partner HSO. “Dynamics AX will be a game changer for enterprise customers.” Customers can sign up for the service today as the new release is available as a monthly subscription in three simple versions that include a self-serve user, a Task user and an Enterprise user. Businesses can get up and running quickly and match their business growth easily by adding business processes and users with this simple and transparent pay-as-you-go model. More information can be found by visiting the Dynamics AX website. Those who want to see the product in action and the impact it is having for businesses can view the Dynamics AX virtual launch event. Microsoft (Nasdaq “MSFT” @microsoft) is the leading platform and productivity company for the mobile-first, cloud-first world, and its mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. Note to editors: For more information, news and perspectives from Microsoft, please visit the Microsoft News Center at http://news.microsoft.com. Web links, telephone numbers and titles were correct at time of publication, but may have changed. For additional assistance, journalists and analysts may contact Microsoft’s Rapid Response Team or other appropriate contacts listed at http://news.microsoft.com/microsoft-public-relations-contacts . 2016-03-15 01:43 By Microsoft

30 E-School for Girls partners with NYU and Microsoft for entrepreneurship event NEW YORK — Feb. 4, 2016 — Pre-college entrepreneurship program E- School for Girls partnered with New York University, Microsoft Corp. and Natalie Zfat for an inspirational and educational event, What It Takes to Be a Successful Entrepreneur, on Feb. 3, 2016, at the NYU Stern School of Business. “Microsoft is committed to empowering entrepreneurs at all stages of their lives, and excited to see more girls and women taking advantage of the rapidly changing technology landscape to bring their ideas to reality,” said Kristina Libby, consumer public relations lead at Microsoft. Speakers at the event included Teaching Garage CEO Janice Chong, Microsoft Consumer PR Communications Lead Kristina Libby, Council of Economic Education CEO Nan J. Morrison, Motivate Design CEO Mona Patel, E-School for Girls Founder and Program Director Allison Wright and entrepreneur Natalie Zfat, who gave lightning talks to a crowd of 100 decision- makers, media, faculty and students. “Over the past three years, E-School for Girls has developed into a premier pre-college program serving the community and our young women as they become female entrepreneurs and our future leaders,” said E-School for Girls Director Allison Wright. “It is my personal mission to ensure that our students get to experience entrepreneurial success, build their skills and confidence, and learn how to support themselves and each other no matter their gender or socioeconomic background. We are developing a new group of female entrepreneurs and leaders in each E-School for Girls class, and I’m excited to grow the program even further in partnership with Microsoft.” Now approaching its third year, E-School for Girls was created in partnership with NYU College Advising Corps and provides underserved high school juniors and seniors with a premier summer pre-college program. The experiential two-week program takes young women through a journey of self-exploration while developing an entrepreneurial enterprise, which includes ideation, business planning, team building, personal branding, pitching, and an introduction to a network of academics, businesspeople and mentors. Microsoft (Nasdaq “MSFT” @microsoft) is the leading platform and productivity company for the mobile-first, cloud-first world, and its mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. E-School for Girls/NYCPromise Inc. is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. Contributions to E- School for Girls/NYCPromise Inc. in the are tax-exempt to the extent provided by law. Note to editors : For more information, news and perspectives from Microsoft, please visit the Microsoft News Center at http://www.microsoft.com/news. Web links, telephone numbers and titles were correct at time of publication, but may have changed. For additional assistance, journalists and analysts may contact Microsoft’s Rapid Response Team or other appropriate contacts listed at http://news.microsoft.com/microsoft-public-relations-contacts . 2016-03-15 01:45 By Microsoft

31 Ghanaian company sets up Bitcoin farm in Africa, claims to be first Ghanaian IT Solutions Company - Ghana Dot Com (GDC) - has set up what is thought to be Africa's first Bitcoin mining facility. Nii Quaynor, who holds the position of chairman at GDC, was also one of the main forces which brought internet to Ghana along with his team at Network Computer Systems (NCS), the now defunct predecessor to GDC. The established Bitcoin producing farm adds several hundred tera-hashes per second capacity to the worldwide Bitcoin pool. The first coins were minted on February 8, 2016 in the facility that GDC claims to be the first on the continent which is dedicated to mining Bitcoins. Going forward, GDC hopes to be a pioneer of crypto currency and blockchain technologies in Africa. General Manager of GDC, Nancy Dotse said "our approach has been to focus on future technologies and to build communities around the technologies for rapid adoption. We invest in Africa's technology future. NCS pioneered the Internet in Africa and GDC seeks to pioneer Bitcoin in Africa. GDC will announce its Crypto currency products soon". To reach its goal, GDC will collaborate with academic institutions to build technical capacity in developing blockchain applications locally. No further details on its collaboration plans or its current Bitcoin farm have been released. Source: Ghana Dot Com via Ghana News Agency | Image via Wikimedia 2016-03-15 02:30 Paul Hill

32 Acer unveils its first external mobile GPU dock powered via Thunderbolt 3 Acer has announced a new mobile graphics dock that allows you to plug in an external mobile graphics card through Thunderbolt 3. The mobile graphics chip included appears to be an NVIDIA GTX 960M. The mobile dock offers three USB 3.0 ports, two DisplayPorts, an HDMI port, and an RJ45 port. It also includes a Thunderbolt 3 port to plug into a compatible device and a DC-IN for simultaneous charging. Acer has demonstrated the graphics dock using its Acer Switch 12 S convertible laptop which is running an Intel Core M processor. Initial benchmarks in 3DMark11 show a score of 940 without the mobile graphics dock and 4048 with the dock plugged in. The potential for future devices using Thunderbolt 3 for mobile graphics looks to be promising. Other computing devices, such as the Razer Blade Stealth , have already promised to include the capabilities of a full desktop graphics card via Thunderbolt 3. While Acer's graphics dock only houses a NVIDIA GTX 960M, it does this in a thin form factor that makes it a great portable solution. North American pricing is yet to be revealed, but reports state that it will retail for approximately 300 Euros, although there is no news in regards to a release date. Source: Winfuture | Image: Gizmodo 2016-03-15 02:14 Mohamed Sanad

33 Did Amazon have a security breach? Probably not We've grown accustomed to security breaches, from Target to Home Depot and pretty much everywhere in between. It seems like daily news lately, but sometimes it seems companies are so hush-mouth that we just don't know. It's obviously in their best interest to not let word get out – bad for business, and all. Today a story surfaced about Amazon sending some customers emails requesting that they reset their passwords. The message itself is a bit cryptic, so it's hard to say what really happened. There is also the (slim) possibility it was a scam. We say slim because there are no links to click on, the message seems legit and a carbon copy of one sent by the company before. Given the content, it seems nothing is amiss with the retail giant. The email simply explains that "As part of our routine monitoring, we discovered a list of email address and password sets posted online". Yes, that's bad enough, but given the propensity for customers to use the same password on multiple services, it becomes much worse. The Digital Reader points out that "It's not clear whether Amazon found another security issue, the same one cropped up again, if Amazon is simply recycling the email text whenever they want you to reset your password, or if some scammer copied that earlier email for a new phishing attempt". There are some obvious things here – don't respond to the email, visit Amazon online by entering the URL and proceeding from there, if you have concerns. BetaNews has contacted Amazon, but so far have not received any statement. For the moment we'll consider what was said in the message and say that changing the password can't hurt, providing you do so through the actual site. If anything changes then we'll let you know. Photo credit: Ken Wolter / Shutterstock 2016-03-15 02:11 By Alan

34 Google now accepting applications for open source Summer of Code 2016 If you are a college student, you probably look forward to the summer as a relaxing time away from learning. Yeah, I get it -- school can be very stressful, but sleeping late and vegetating won't result in meaningful growth. Instead of wasting your summer, why not learn about open source? If that sounds boring, then maybe it isn't for you. However, if you are excited by the possibility of working on an open source project like Fedora, KDE, LibreOffice or VLC, then you should sign up for Google's Summer of Code 2016. "For twelve years running, GSoC gives participants a chance to work on an open source software project entirely online. Students, who receive a stipend for their successful contributions, are paired with mentors who can help address technical questions and concerns throughout the program. Former GSoC participants have told us that the real-world experience they’ve gained during the program has not only sharpened their technical skills, but has also boosted their confidence, broadened their professional network and enhanced their resumes", says Mary Radomile, Google Open Source team. Radomile further says, "students who are interested can submit proposals on the program site now through Friday, March 25 at 19:00 UTC. The first step is to review the 180 open source projects and find project ideas that appeal to you. Since spots are limited, we recommend a strong project proposal to help increase your chances of selection. Our Student Manual provides lots of helpful advice to get you started on choosing an organization and crafting a great application". Would you or someone you know be interested in participating? If so, you can go here to learn more. While the 25th of March is not imminent, it will be here before you know it. Remember the old adage of the early bird gets the worm -- show some moxie and sign up quickly. Do not wait until the last minute. Will you sign up? Tell me in the comments. 2016-03-15 00:48 By Brian

35 AMD and Sulon announce Sulon Q "all-in-one" AR/VR headset that runs Windows 10 AMD may be best known for its value-oriented processors and graphics cards , but it seems that the company wants to be a part of the virtual reality race. Canadian-based startup Sulon has recently announced an AMD-powered headset called Sulon Q, claiming it is "the world’s first and only all-in-one headset" for "virtual reality, augmented reality, and spatial computing. " What is interesting about the new headset is that it doesn't require tethering to a PC like the Oculus Rift or the HTC Vive , as it is essentially a Windows 10 PC that you can strap onto your head. It is powered by a quad-core AMD FX-8800P processor with a 35W TDP and 8 Radeon R7 graphics cores, leveraging AMD's GCN architecture. It's nice to see a VR headset that doesn't require investing in a powerful PC in order to work, unlike the current crop of headsets. However, before you get too excited, Sulon claims "console- quality graphics", but keep in mind that this headset has to drive a 2560 by 1440 OLED display, a resolution almost 30% higher than that of wired headsets, which require a high-end gaming PC to drive their displays. Other than the specs mentioned above, the headset features 8 GB of DDR3L RAM and 256 GB of SSD storage, which - along with the CPU and GPU - are low end by VR standards. Developers can, however, tap into the power of DirectX 12 , Vulkan , and AMD's LiquidVR APIs to squeeze the most out of it. Connectivity-wise, there are 2 USB 3.0 Type A ports, a microHDMI out, Wifi 802.11n/ac, and Bluetooth 4.0. A claim that is definitely impressive is that the Sulon Q offers a 110 degree field of view, but we don't know whether the measurement was horizontal or diagonal. It is also meant to be an AR headset, and judging from the demo video below, it might have a wider field of view compared to Microsoft's Hololens Developer Edition : Another thing to like about the Sulon Q (at least on paper) is that it is supposed to offer "Spatial computing" with Windows 10, by virtue of an app called "Project Dargon" that uses a dedicated "Spatial Processing Unit" and the integrated tracking hardware to create safe and seamless virtual experiences. Regarding price and availability, the Sulon Q headset is slated for a "late spring" launch, and there's no word on price. However, judging by the fact that the Oculus Rift costs $600 without taking the powerful PC it needs into the equation , we can probably expect a hefty price tag for the Sulon Q headset. It may sound appealing to have a "tether-free" AR and VR 2-in-1 headset, but there are no details yet on exactly how heavy it is, how hot it gets when in use, how long the battery lasts, and whether or not performance is good enough to make the experience great. We'll just have to wait and see, but it looks at least mildly promising. Source: Sulon Via: RockPaperShotgun 2016-03-15 00:22 Adrian Potoroaca

36 36 Upstream oil and gas companies spend smarter on digital technologies to drive value, reduce costs in downturn, Accenture and Microsoft survey finds HOUSTON — March 9, 2016 — As upstream oil and gas companies scrutinize every dollar invested, they’re spending smarter today on digital technologies, seeking to drive value and reduce costs amid low oil and gas prices, a new survey by Accenture (NYSE: ACN) and Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ: MSFT) reports. Respondents to the “ 2016 Upstream Oil and Gas Digital Trends Survey” included international oil companies (IOCs), national oil companies (NOCs), independents and oilfield services firms. Over the next three to five years, 80 percent of upstream oil and gas companies plan to spend the same, more, or significantly more (30%, 36%, and 14%, respectively) on digital technologies as they do now, according to the survey, now in its fifth edition. This continued investment in digital is due to respondents’ confidence that digital technologies can continue to help them drive leaner, smarter organizations. More than half (53 percent) of respondents said digital is already adding high to significant value to their businesses. Cost reduction was identified as the biggest challenge that digital technologies can most address today, respondents said. In addition, respondents reported that making faster and better decisions was the greatest benefit digital technologies can deliver (56 percent) and that one of the biggest barriers to realizing value is the lack of a clear strategy or business case, not the technology itself. Today’s digital investments focus more on mobility, with almost three-fifths of respondents (57 percent) reporting having invested in mobile, compared to 49 percent of the respondents in last year’s survey. Next is investing in the Internet of Things (IoT) (44 percent) this year vs. 25 percent in 2015 and the cloud (38 percent), up 8 percent from last year. Over the next three to five years, these investments are expected to shift more to big data and analytics (38 percent), IoT (36 percent) and mobile (31 percent). “In the current challenging environment, the upstream oil and gas industry is focusing digital technologies on areas that help them work smarter and deliver significant efficiencies and savings in the short term while enabling them to make better decisions faster,” said Rich Holsman, global head of Digital in Accenture’s Energy industry group. “So, in the short term we expect these companies will continue to invest in areas that help lower operations costs through technologies like increased worker productivity with mobility, lower infrastructure costs through the cloud and drive better asset management through analytics.” Respondents said digital’s biggest impact to date on the upstream oil and gas workforce has been increased employee productivity and engagement followed by better training and reskilling opportunities. They see the greatest impact from IoT in enabling connected field workers, with 60 percent of respondents planning to have field workers and assets digitally connected with smart devices. The use of the cloud, respondents said, has shifted from being used primarily for infrastructure to an enabler of mobile tools. This trend is expected to increase in the next three to five years, as companies keep using the cloud to get faster and more value from other digital technologies. “By taking advantage of the intelligent cloud, greater use of analytics and IoT go hand in hand with what we are seeing in our business today — the advent of the industrial Internet enabling the power of digital across the oil and gas landscape,” said Craig Hodges, general manager of the Gulf Coast District at Microsoft. “You can see this trend gaining traction from connected wells and intelligent pipelines to highly- efficient digital refineries.” While two thirds (66 percent) identified analytics as one of the most important capabilities for transforming their company, only 13 percent felt their firm’s analytical capabilities were mature. Almost two-thirds (65 percent) plan to implement more analytic capabilities in the next three years to help address this need. The “2016 Upstream Oil and Gas Digital and Technology Trends Survey,” sponsored by Accenture and Microsoft and conducted by PennEnergy Research in partnership with the Oil & Gas Journal, surveyed upstream professionals worldwide, including engineers, geologists and mid-level and executive management. About Accenture Accenture is a leading global professional services company, providing a broad range of services and solutions in strategy, consulting, digital, technology and operations. Combining unmatched experience and specialized skills across more than 40 industries and all business functions – underpinned by the world’s largest delivery network – Accenture works at the intersection of business and technology to help clients improve their performance and create sustainable value for their stakeholders. With approximately 373,000 people serving clients in more than 120 countries, Accenture drives innovation to improve the way the world works and lives. Visit us at www.accenture.com. Accenture Digital , comprised of Accenture Analytics , Accenture Interactive and Accenture Mobility , offers a comprehensive portfolio of business and technology services across digital marketing, mobility and analytics. Learn more about Accenture Digital at www.accenture.com/digital . About Microsoft Microsoft (Nasdaq “MSFT” @microsoft) is the leading platform and productivity company for the mobile-first, cloud-first world, and its mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. 2016-03-15 02:04 By Microsoft

37 Google may be bringing windowed apps to Android N Google surprised the tech community when they released the Android N Developer Preview a couple months before Google I/O, their annual developer conference. Among quite a few new features was split-screen multitasking. Much of what we know about Android N has come from reading the documentation. After all, the only features that they told us about are the ones that they want us to know about before their big event. As it turns out, there's more to this split-screen multitasking than we had imagined. The documentation for Android N discusses a freeform mode, which would include windowed apps. It's not clear if the new freeform mode will come to just tablets or if it will support phones as well. After all, it was surprising to see Google decide to support split-screen on phones, since both Windows and iOS reserve that feature for tablets and in Windows' case, PCs. Google could also be grooming a competitor to Microsoft's Continuum. It would be no surprise that Google wants to compete in the "phone that you can use as your desktop" market, after being left flat-footed in the "tablet that can replace your laptop" market. If that's the case, then "freeform" and split-screen make perfect sense on phones. Of course, we won't know anything for sure until Google takes the stage at Google I/O. You can check out our hands-on with the Android N Developer Preview right here . Source: Ars Technica 2016-03-15 00:00 Richard Woods

38 How to: Install Phoenix on Kodi In its original form, Kodi is great for streaming locally stored content, but the software really comes into its own when you start installing add-ons. There are hundreds to choose from, but the most impressive and powerful extension is probably Phoenix. Known as the spiritual successor to Genesis, Phoenix gives you access to hours of content – from old TV shows to brand- new films, and it's quick and intuitive to use too. Interested? Here's how to download it. To install Phoenix, first go to System | Settings | Add-ons. Once there you'll see a tab saying 'Add source' - click on it. This method works by pointing your computer or device to a web address, and then treating it like a USB stick or removable hard drive. This time, we'll be using the web address http://fusion.tvaddons.ag , so enter it exactly as it is, and then click Done. Make sure you name the source something like Phoenix, so that it's easy to remember. Go back to your homescreen, and then navigate to System | Add-ons | Install From Zip File. A list of folders will appear, but we're after the one we just added. Click on it, and then select a file called "xmbc-repos". Click on the file marked Eenglish, and then select the next file marked "repository.xbmchub- x.x.x.zip". After waiting for a notification that should say "Add-on enabled", select Install From Repository | TVADDONS.ag Addon Repository | Video Add-ons | Phoenix. 2016-03-15 00:00 Comment Now

39 How to: Protect your email account An email account is the gateway to your personal life, which means that it's also a valuable target for cybercriminals. From banking credentials to social media passwords, your email inbox is a treasure chest of sensitive data. In light of this, it's no surprise that hackers have become extremely efficient in exploiting email accounts. From malware-ridden macros to complex social engineering, they've never been better equipped. So what can you do to bulk up your email security and keep your account secure? It's important to create a solid security foundation or you'll be left vulnerable from step one. For starters, pick a unique email address that variates from just your name then back that up with a long, original, passphrase. There are plenty of ways to create strong passwords, such as mixing letters, numbers and symbols to make sure it's difficult to crack. Furthermore, make sure your password stays secure. If you reuse the same details for every account or leave them saved in a text file on your desktop there's a much greater chance your account will be compromised. There are a lot of options these days when it comes to email clients, from the big-name players of Outlook and to smaller programs such as Thunderbird and OS X Mail. While each has its advantages and disadvantages, for general users it's probably best to stick to the most well- supported clients. Not only are they free of charge, but they have security measures built in as standard. Furthermore, regular updates and upgrades will roll out fairly consistently. Unless you're sharing government secrets (we're fairly sure Julian Assange doesn't use Gmail), a standard email client will work just fine. In this digital age, cybercriminals have sophisticated ways to get into your email inbox, yet people continue to fall for simple tactics, such as phishing or malicious links. While you may feel you'll never be caught out by these common tricks, cybercriminals are getting better at disguising their activity. Social engineering, for example, has grown as people share more and more personal information online. From just a public Facebook account, a hacker will be able to tell a lot about you, from where you live, to where you eat, to your closest friends and family. Typically, this information will be exploited to craft malicious emails that appear to be legitimate, such as an invoice from your boss or your partner sharing photos of a recent holiday. Stay aware. While many email clients will catch these attacks before they reach your inbox, some may slip through. Of course, even the best security standards will mean nothing if you don't use a reliable antivirus or anti-malware product, which boasts protection against malware, spyware, phishing attacks and spam. If you suspect that your computer may have a problem, it's advisable to do a full- system scan to curb any potential threats that may be lurking. Once you have a solid foundation of security in place, the next step is to add extra protection by turning on two-factor authentication (2FA). This works by allowing you to add an extra verification method to your email account such as a secondary email address or a text message and is now frequently offered by major websites that handle sensitive user data. Increasingly popular with major services such as Google's Gmail and social giant Facebook is location logging, which shows you where your account is being accessed from and from what device. Even better, you can keep an eye on unfamiliar IP addresses and even block connections remotely. If you do need a stronger level of protection for sending or receiving emails, for example while dealing with bank details, you can always use an extra layer of encryption such as Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) to keep your secrets secure. That said, for most cases modern email uses decent levels of cryptography and will only send emails over secure connections. Google, for example, recently installed warnings that alert you if your contacts are not on an encrypted connection – a welcome move. It goes without saying, but public Wi-Fi is not a safe place to access sensitive information such as bank accounts or email inboxes. If you want to keep your data properly safe from hackers, be aware that it's becoming increasingly easy for criminals to compromise your accounts using 'man-in-the-middle' style attacks to intercept data as it passes along open networks used in coffee shops, airports and train stations. If you're on the move and have to use public Wi-Fi, at the very least use a good virtual private network (VPN). As hackers become increasingly sophisticated, it's more important than ever to make sure you have basic cyber hygiene in place. While no one can claim to be 100% safe from attack, using these tips will leave you better protected than most. This is why it's doubly important to use strong protection software, as it detects malware hidden in emails and phishing attempts that masquerade as legitimate messages. 2016-03-15 00:00 Comment Now

40 Microsoft will continue to accept Bitcoin in the Windows Store Yesterday, we reported that Microsoft was no longer accepting Bitcoin as a method to pay for content on Windows and Xbox. Today, Microsoft is stating that the firm does still accept Bitcoin, and that the Microsoft web site that said that they won't was accidental. Microsoft issued the following statement to Softpedia , who discovered the original story: It's impossible to tell for sure if the firm is backtracking or if it was really accidental that they said what they did. Nevertheless, fans of the digital currency can once again rejoice. Source: Softpedia 2016-03-14 23:42 Richard Woods

41 Microsoft's Edge Extensions Preview website appears ahead of official release Last

week, we reported that extensions for Microsoft's latest web browser, Edge, are likely to appear in the next Windows 10 Preview build for PC. Now, the official website for the preview of Edge Extensions has appeared online, ahead of the actual announcement and release, just a day after an extension showed up in the Windows Store. The website provides several pieces of information on the upcoming extension support for Edge. One of the most interesting points are the extensions that the website lists as being available. Microsoft Translator, Reddit Enhancement Suite, and Mouse Gestures are three extensions currently listed as being downloadable. Selecting the Download button does download an executable file, allowing you to install the extension. The installation process for installing extensions is also detailed as follows: The extension should then be listed in Edge. This method of installation is for manually installing extensions during the Preview. It is likely to be improved for ease-of-use upon global release. During the Preview, extensions will not be listed in the Windows Store; however, once the feature is rolled-out to all Windows 10 users, you will then be able to install extensions from the Windows Store. Finally, the website also shows how the 'extension bar' works - the bar that shows all the extension icons. In Edge, under the 'more' menu, you will see a new row, which is where extension icons will be displayed, and you can select them to view the options associated with that extension. Here's a screenshot of it in action: You can take a look at the Preview for Edge Extensions website here. Source: MSPowerUser 2016-03-14 23:26 Jack Wilkinson

42 Apple seeds iOS 9.3 beta 7 to developers and the public Apple has seeded iOS 9.3 beta 7 to both the developer and public beta. Throughout this beta cycle - which includes iOS 9.3, OS X 10.11.4 El Capitan, watchOS 2.2, and tvOS 9.2 - all four OSes have typically been iterated at the same time. When beta 6 was released , tvOS 9.2 was left out, only to be released a few days later. Today, iOS 9.3 beta 7 is released on its own. It also comes at an odd time during the day, typically being released at 10 AM PT. This likely shows that Apple is getting ready for a public release, likely to be timed in accordance with their event on March 21. iOS 9.3 includes a number of new features, such as Night Shift, password protection in Notes, new 3D Touch options, Health includes suggestions, PDF syncing in iBooks, and Wi-Fi calling on Verizon. The firm also introduced some interesting new educational features for the iPad. It's the seventh iteration of a minor update, so there's nothing new here that's front facing. We'll update the post if we find anything. Have you found anything new in iOS 9.3 beta 7? Let us know in the comments! 2016-03-14 23:10 Richard Woods

43 A Glimpse at the Future of Containers in the Enterprise With containers gaining increasing popularity in enterprise environments across a variety of industries to automate the deployment of applications, Joyent and others in the container ecosystem got together to give a state-of-the-state event at the Container Summit conference Feb. 10 in New York City. Although the cloud native world is adopting container technologies, such as Docker, only 8 percent of enterprises are using them in production, said Dave Bartoletti, a principal analyst at Forrester Research. Yet curiosity about containers is soaring. Bartoletti said questions from clients about containers and when and how to deploy them have increased by a factor of 10 in the last two years. Indeed, many of the speakers at the Container Summit said they were introduced to container technology in a previous job and moved it to their current role. Others simply adopted it as the proper thing to do. This eWEEK slide show looks at some of the scenes from the Container Summit and what industry experts had to say about the technology. 2016-03-14 21:54 Darryl K.

44 Anonymous launches OpTrump; declares war on Donald Trump The high-profile hacking collective known as Anonymous has declared what it calls a 'total war' on United States presidential candidate Donald Trump. In a video posted on March 4th , Anonymous declared a 'total-war' on Donald Trump. The video, spoken by a disguised person in a Guy Fawkes mask, told followers of the group to bring down his websites and aim to halt Trump's presidential bid by exposing embarrassing information. The renewed war on Trump comes about as Anonymous claims that his "inconsistent and hateful campaign has not only shocked the United States America, you have shocked the entire planet with your appalling actions and ideas". As part of its campaign, it will use the hashtag #OpTrump. To begin with, the collective is asking for help in bringing down several of Trump's sites, including: The first coordinated attack has been scheduled for April 1st, with the target set as trumpchicago.com. Unverified information on Trump and his staff has already been posted by the collective. Of which, the information included his social security number. A post by Anonymous on Ghostbin, which cannot be linked due to personally identifiable information, claims that they have managed to hack Trump's voicemail and have leaked embarrassing messages. Source: Business Insider via Engadget 2016-03-14 22:54 Jack Wilkinson

45 Blockai uses the blockchain to help artists protect their intellectual property While most of the discussions around blockchain have focused on its possible uses in finance , startup Blockai is looking at something different — helping artists, photographers and other creators register their work so that they can protect it from potential copyright infringement. CEO Nathan Lands is pitching this as an intermediate step between registering your work with the Library of Congress and doing nothing. Technically, your work is copyrighted as soon as you create the novel, drawing or whatever. However, registration is required if you want to sue someone for infringement. Lands said that when interviewing artists around the San Francisco Bay Area, he found that only 10 percent are registering their work with the Library of Congress, but the rest of them are worried that they should. So the goal here is to create proof of creation in a public database (namely, the blockchain) without necessarily dealing with the time and cost of officially registering. With Blockai, you just drag-and-drop to register your work, and you’ll get a registration certificate. Then if, say, someone’s reproducing your digital art or photo without permission, you can send them a copy of the certificate. Will that hold legal water? According to Lands, it hasn’t happened yet, but “we believe that a record created on the blockchain using Blockai would serve as sufficient evidence in a court of law.” And hopefully you won’t have to go to court at all, since sending the certificate seems “a lot more serious than sending them an Instagram picture.” “The blockchain is the perfect solution for providing proof of creation,” Lands said. “It’s a permanent immutable record. Meaning, once the record is there it’s there forever and will never change.” “The ideal future system is one where there is a universal database for claiming ownership of creations and for paying royalties,” Lands added. “Making it as simple as possible for people to do the right thing.” With Blockai, Lands is at least taking steps in that direction. The startup has raised $547,000 from investors including Scott and Cyan Banister (plus their AngelList syndicate), Social Starts, Sterling VC, Vectr Ventures, Brian Cartmell and Ramen Underground. 2016-03-14 20:16 Anthony Ha

46 Trainline buys Captain Train for up to $189 million We hear a lot about how companies like Uber are transforming car-based transportation, but today comes news of another play in the sector, this time covering rail services. Trainline , a U. K.- based ticket service for railway and long-distance bus journeys, has acquired Captain Train , a Paris-based competitor that sells tickets for rail journeys on the continent, in what sources close to the deal tell us is a deal worth over €100 million, potentially between €160 and €170 million ($178 million to $189 million), half in cash and half in shares. The deal points to wider consolidation in the market, creating a single company that will let users buy tickets across 22 countries and covering some 36 train operators — and potentially help that industry compete better against other forms of short and longhaul European travel, such as low-cost airlines. Acquisition talks started a year ago in March 2015. Clare Gilmartin, Trainline’s CEO, would not confirm the price range that our sources provided us with, but she told us that the funds used in the deal come from a “multi hundred million pound” investment made in Trainline by KKR, which acquired Trainline in January 2015, reportedly in a deal valued at up to $671 million (as with today’s deal, the financial terms were not disclosed). While most of the train companies that work with Trainline and Captain Train are also, in a sense, direct competitors with online booking forms of their own, Captain Train (originally called Capitaine Train) made a name for itself by building a smart platform that makes the process of buying those tickets significantly faster and easier — faster in fact than Trainline’s own service currently. There are two key reasons why Trainline wants to acquire Captain Train. First, Trainline is overwhelmingly dominant in the U. K. but doesn’t operate anywhere else in Europe (Trainline has been trying to break into Europe, unsuccessfully). Captain Train sells tickets in France, Germany, Italy and many other European countries. Acquiring the French startup is much faster than signing deals with each train company in other European countries. Second, Trainline doesn’t have its own itinerary calculation system. The company pays millions every year to use SilverRail. In the future, you can expect Trainline to switch to an in-house system powered by Captain Train’s technology. It would save the company millions every year. “Today, the focus is on growing as much as possible in Europe,” Captain Train co-founder and CEO told TechCrunch. “We have the partnerships in Europe, we have the technical expertise with our own itinerary system that they don’t have. They have the vast majority of the U. K. market and marketing power.” Guyot will remain CEO of the subsidiary and take on the additional role of Director of Trainline International Limited. Captain Train currently has some 1.4 million registered users and sells 5,000 tickets daily. In 2015, Captain Train processed $80 million in train ticket transactions (€72 million). Trainline, originally a spinoff from the Virgin Group, says it is the fifth largest e-commerce business in the U. K., with 4.7 million active customers and nearly 21 million web visits per month. It processes some $2.3 billion ticket transactions annually (£1.6 billion). The two brands will co-exist for the time being. In the coming months, Trainline will add European itineraries and Captain Train will add British itineraries. Trainline has also been trying to tap into the convenience and cost factors, building an app, Train, to help people better navigate the transportation system. “We see significant growth in the rail market,” said Gilmartin, who noted that most sales today are still “largely offline, with close to 80% booked in station with people paying the highest price.” When KKR acquired Trainline many saw it as a move that would take the UK company away from a potential public listing. Today, Trainline makes about a 5% commission on each ticket sale in the UK, Gilmartin said. Captain Train doesn’t disclose its margins. This could help position the company for displaying a bigger growth trajectory and potentially going public down the line. “One year ago when KKR first invested in Trainline we had the vision of creating the clear global leader in digital rail mobility,” said Philipp Freise, Member and Head of Technology, Media and Telecoms in Europe at KKR in a statement. “The combination of Trainline and Captain Train is an important step on this journey, and will bring together a management team of world-class talent in rail, tech, product and marketing.” 2016-03-14 20:16 Ingrid Lunden

47 Phonvert has a plan to convert old smartphones into IoT nodes As humanity creates more and more smartphones each year there is an unintended glut of still capable yet less desirable one-year- old or two-year-old smartphones that take the backseat to new models. While many of these retired smartphones still work and have usable sensors like cameras, accelerometers, touch screens and bluetooth radios, large swaths of them remain unused or, worse yet, end up in landfills. At SXSW 2016 , I spoke with the leader of the Phonvert project, Tomo Kihara, and he pointed me to research from IDC “that more than 280 million working smartphones were replaced without being recycled last year.” With this info in mind, Tomo along with Keisuke Shiro, Kosuke Takahashi, and Seibe Takahashi founded Phonvert—an open source software platform that can convert retired smartphones into usable IoT (Internet of Things) nodes. You install Phonvert onto your old smartphone and then you can make it usable and valuable again for a variety of tasks like: Fridge Cam, Mailbox Cam, Video Baby Monitor to name a few. It’s important to note that the team—based out of Tokyo—thinks of themselves more as a movement than a startup. They are also open to collecting new ideas for how smartphones can be reused with their software on twitter via the hashtag #phonvert. 2016-03-14 20:16 Jay Donovan

48 Watch us beat the heck out of each other in Disney’s new fighter, Marvel Battlegrounds Tomorrow morning Disney will launch Marvel Battlegrounds, a new four-player superhero fighting game built on top of their Disney Infinity platform. Disney Infinity producer John Vignocchi stopped by TechCrunch HQ to give us an early peek… and things got intense. We here at TechCrunch tend to take everything a little too seriously, so the stakes were high. Namely, we were fighting for the Iron Belt — a finely crafted leather masterpiece that we promptly lost and replaced with a plastic dollar store wrestling belt with Iron Man crap glued to it. I’ll save my full impressions for a proper review in a couple days, but at a glance, at least, Marvel Battlegrounds seems like a blast of a game… but one that comes with some big built in costs. The pacing of the game is fast, but not quite to the newcomer-crushing degree found in other brawlers like Super Smash Brothers. The learning curve is certainly a bit less steep than Smash… though, at the level we were playing at, we were mostly just mashing buttons. It reminds me a bit of Power Stone, a 1999 Dreamcast game that I really, really loved. As you take and give damage, you build up a charged attack that does massive damage to everything around your character. These seem like they’re going to be key: in each match we played, knowing when to fire off (and how to avoid) these attacks are what swung the game toward the eventual winners. My only hold-up, and it’s not a tiny one: like all games in this toys-to-life category (where physical, real world figurines are used to unlock the in-game characters), this one seems like it could get expensive fast. There are around 25 characters to chose from at launch, one of which (Captain America) comes with the set. Each figurine costs $10-15 bucks, depending on where you buy it. If you want to have every character at your disposal (and with a multiplayer fighting game, you generally do. More characters = more variety = more fun.) that’s over $300 you’re shelling out on figurines. Add that on top of the $35+ you’ll pay for the required Disney Infinity starter set and the $20 you pay for the Marvel Battlegrounds playset to begin with, and… well … it gets a little crazy. Stemming the craziness considerably is the concept of trial coins that you earn while just playing the game. Each trial coin can temporarily unlock any character on the roster until the next time the console is powered down, allowing you to give that character a spin — or to unlock a bunch of characters when your friends come over — without throwing down for the respective figures. Once the console turns off, though, they’re gone. Meanwhile, Disney will also temporarily unlock a rotating handful of characters for one week at a time. That way, even folks with just one statue and no trial coins to spare will have enough characters available for a four-player match. It also helps that older Disney Infinity 2.0 Marvel figurines work with this set, some of which existing Infinity fans probably already own. But, on that same note, some of these older figurines can be tough to find, thus making it tough to fully flesh out your roster. All in all, the game seems like a blast; but is the inevitably-expensive toys-to-life category a good fit for a fighting game? Disney is being more generous than they have to be here with the trial character/coin system… but the completionist in me is already tempted to throw down piles of money just to have the full experience. 2016-03-14 20:16 Greg Kumparak

49 European Space Agency’s ExoMars successfully starts its journey to the red planet The first phase of ExoMars , an uncrewed Mars mission from the European Space Agency (ESA), successfully launched today from Baikonur, Kazakhstan. Lifting off on a Russian Proton- M rocket, the Mars-bound spacecraft has begun its 7 month, 300 million mile long journey and is scheduled to arrive in October. The objective of today’s mission is to search for evidence of life on Mars, active geological processes, and to test key technologies required for subsequent Mars missions. ExoMars is made up of 2 phases. Today’s launch brought along 2 different modules that make up the first phase: the Trace Gas Orbiter and the Entry, Descent and Landing Demonstrator Module known as “Schiaparelli.” ExoMars Phase 2 will launch in 2018 and includes a rover designed to conduct exobiology and geochemistry research. Upon arrival to Mars on October 16 th , the Trace Gas Orbiter will separate from Schiaparelli. Three days later, on October 19 th , Schiaparelli will begin its descent and attempt to land on the surface. After touching down, Schiaparelli will use the Trace Gas Orbiter as a relay to communicate with the ExoMars team back on Earth. A successful landing would mark an important milestone for ESA. Their last attempt to place a lander on the Martian surface occurred in late 2003 with the Beagle 2 lander. Similar to ExoMars, the Beagle 2 traveled to Mars with an orbiter. On December 19 th 2003, Beagle 2 was successfully deployed from the Mars Express orbiter and was scheduled to land on December 25 th. Unfortunately, ESA was unable to contact the lander after its expected touchdown. After multiple failed contact attempts, ESA declared the mission lost. Over 12 years later, ESA intends to overcome that failure by successfully landing and communicating with Schiaparelli. In addition to enabling communication for the lander, the Trace Gas Orbiter will collect scientific data from an altitude of 400 kilometers above the surface. For reference, the International Space Station orbits the Earth also at an altitude of 400 kilometers. The instruments on board the orbiter will be used to detect and characterize trace gases in the Martian atmosphere with an improved accuracy of 3 orders of magnitude compared to previous measurements. Scientists are particularly interested in characterizing the presence of small amounts of methane that have been detected in the Martian atmosphere. This piques researchers’ interests because living organisms produce large amounts of methane here on Earth. While there are also purely geological processes that produce the gas, it’s a good starting point for those searching for life on Mars. To make matters more interesting, methane is short-lived on geological time scales. Its presence suggests that there’s an active source producing the gas on Mars today. Further research is required to determine where the methane is coming from. The Trace Gas Orbiter will also be used to map hydrogen levels just beneath the Martian surface. Locations where hydrogen is found may indicate water-ice deposits, which could be useful for future crewed missions. Landing locations for crewed missions may be influenced by these findings since water-ice can be leveraged to generate potable water or rocket fuel. Phase 2 of ExoMars will launch in May 2018, which is also when NASA’s next Martian lander is scheduled to embark on a trip to the red planet. 2016-03-14 20:16 Emily Calandrelli

50 50 Validating adtech: Innovation is a stronger proof point than share price Adtech is in trouble because many firms have gotten the cold shoulder from venture capital. Supposedly. Another way to say that, of course, is that smart venture capitalists passed on startups that failed to demonstrate how they would add value to the space. So is that bad news or good news for adtech? Unfortunately, many people confuse free-flowing capital with value. That way of thinking suggests that the volume of speculation is the sole measure of an industry’s vitality. A better metric, however, is revenue, because it validates a company’s fundamentals as well as the larger potential of the market. Consider adtech’s consolidation binge; companies with value got acquired, they didn’t go bankrupt. That value, often enough, is the innovation contained within the technology those firms developed. Adtech is healthy, not because investors are taking wild bets, but because we’re seeing an accurate and dispassionate appraisal of the winners and losers from the previous funding round. More importantly, investors and adtech companies enjoy an alignment of expectations, meaning that new money will continue to fund new ventures — so long as those companies demonstrate value in a constantly evolving and innovating space. Step back from the daily swings of the stock market and a paradox emerges for adtech companies. Big players like Google and Facebook — both adtech companies at their core, if you look at revenue — are seen as having bright futures. In contrast, the same people who tout Google and Facebook so highly paint the rest of adtech with a skeptical brush. Why the schizophrenic outlook? The answer depends on whether you take the narrow or wider view. From a narrow perspective, adtech has an abundance of companies that are impossible to differentiate. Some of these companies add value, but many more profit by leveraging the technology of others. They are middlemen, and adtech is bloated with middlemen it does not need. Publishers and advertisers understand this problem because they have come to understand that the quick hit — the click or the impression — is only a small piece of a very large and complex puzzle. Put simply, firms that leverage the technology of others for the sole purpose of optimizing campaign performance are in trouble because their only product is worth a lot less than previously thought, while, at the same, the field of competitors has grown more crowded. From a wider perspective, it’s a different story because we’re talking about a very different goal. The broader challenge in adtech no longer centers around the superficial click; rather, it’s a question of building a data model that captures the lifetime value of the customer. Quite obviously, Google and Facebook have the scale to understand the customer within a larger, lifetime context. But we shouldn’t conflate the opportunity to collect data with the tools that make that information so valuable. Here, many adtech players have a lot to offer because the more of them that endeavor to know about their customers, the greater the need for tools that provide real-time insights, analysis, and action. That’s a tremendous opportunity to invest and innovate when you consider the fact that nearly half of all marketers in a recent IAB survey cited “insufficient availability and functionality of supporting technology” as a key obstacle to deriving value from data-driven marketing. The big news is that adtech and martech are merging. There’s a core truth to that assertion in terms of the larger challenge of building infrastructure and tools that are essential for an omni- channel, lifetime view of the customer. But the adtech/martech merger also comes with a lot of hot air, because adtech’s valueless middlemen see it as an opportunity to rebrand and (they hope) secure the next round of financing. No wonder some say adtech isn’t in trouble, it’s just misunderstood. Of course, technology investors are too sophisticated to fall for a rebrand. Frankly, it doesn’t matter if you call yourself adtech, martech or just tech. What we’re really talking about is performance. The companies that add value will be the ones that improve performance as it pertains to sales and other concrete business goals. To a point, advertising will remain a part of that mission, but the task is much bigger than targeting and retargeting an ad campaign. In the same way that adtech innovated the ad campaign through targeting, automation and attribution, the mission now is to broaden and deepen that revolution across the enterprise. That’s why there’s a lot of opportunity in adtech; our value will be measured by the extent to which we become enterprise-wide innovation partners to our clients. 2016-03-14 20:16 Hagai Tal

51 Skype for Web upgraded, now supports dialing mobile phones, landlines and more Skype for Web, the browser-based version of Microsoft’s popular communications software introduced last year, is getting a slew of new features that brings it more in line with its desktop and mobile counterparts – most notably the added ability to dial mobile phones and landlines. The web version also now allows you to bring non- Skype users into a conversation easily, introduces notifications, and lets you watch YouTube videos in Skype for Web itself. Microsoft says the new features were based on user feedback which helped the company to decide those that needed to roll out first. To make calls to mobile phones or landlines from the browser, you’ll need a subscription or Skype credit, as on other platforms. Then, once signed in, you can click on the phone call tab, pick a destination, and dial. Meanwhile, watching YouTube videos is as simple as clicking a play button. YouTube links will include an embedded, playable video that includes volume and full-screen controls, like on the YouTube website, but you’ll no longer need to open a new browser window to watch. This feature follows an improvement to how URLs in general appear on Skype for Web – they now include an image from the webpage, too. The ability to add non-Skype users to conversations is also something that has existed on other platforms. Designed to reduce the barrier to entry to using Skype, invitees don’t have to download apps anymore or create accounts when they’re invited to join a chat by another Skype user. This push for more viral adoption of the communications platform comes at a time when the aging Skype is threatened by newcomers like Slack. While Slack started as a way to reduce email by offering a team chat environment for workplaces, it’s now ramping up its efforts to challenge Skype more directly, including by introducing calling features. Also new in Skype for Web is support for notifications, so you can be alerted to incoming messages even if you’re in another application or different browser tab, the company notes. Microsoft says these features are the first of many more on the roadmap planned for the months ahead. 2016-03-14 20:16 Sarah Perez

52 Blooming measures your heart and brain to reduce stress at work Finnish startup Blooming is aiming to help bouncing-off-the-walls-stressed office workers re- take control of their lives by using wearable tech. The service includes monitoring and tracking stress levels, plus recommendation software and meditation advice to help give workers the space to stop and smell the roses. To help its plans come to fruition, the company recently raised a small round of pre- seed funding from Lifeline Ventures and Reaktor Ventures . The company combines existing hardware solutions with their own software platform and a series of coaching services. For the brain activity monitoring, it partnered with Interaxon , which already creates a series of products to help improve mediation. For the heart rate monitoring hardware, Blooming turned to Firstbeat , which has a broad line-up of tools for sports, stress, and sleep monitoring tools. The service combines training programs, technology for self-monitoring, personal coaching and a light brushing of peer pressure to help keep stress levels under control, all delivered via smartphone app. The main thrust of the company’s siege against mental corrosion is mindfulness meditation. “Blooming’s vision is to make mindfulness meditation as widely practiced as physical exercise, giving people tools for self-empowerment, leading to reduction of stress and anxiety”, says Kristian Ranta, Blooming’s CEO and Founder. The company’s CEO Kristian Ranta co-founded Diabetes-care company Mendor. Ex-Olympic snowboarder and mindfulness coach Alexi Litovaara joined Blooming as the head coach, and developed the training programs. Pricing-wise, Blooming’s service positions it as a high-end perk; “An intensive 8-week program with a personal coach will cost $2,500”, says Riku Lindholm, Blooming’s co-founder. After the initial two months, follow-up content $79 per month. The company’s battle plan is ambitious, but the company will be facing some serious cultural challenges. The price point indicates that Blooming is aiming for high-end corporations, but that might just prove be the wrong crowd. While mindfulness and meditation is finding favor in certain industries, that may not be true for bigger corporations — and especially in the company’s home market of Scandinavia. Sitting cross-legged and chanting mantras at work will be met with a range of emotions from mild amusement to deep suspicion, and I fear asking workers to don headbands and heart rate monitors on top of that is bound to go down like a 1984-flavoured, sarcasm-laced lead balloon. Blooming’s service has been in early testing since December 2015 and is now being further developed towards a Beta release this month. 2016-03-14 20:16 Haje Jan

53 Google loses Android antitrust appeal in Russia Google has lost an appeal in a Russian court against an antitrust ruling pertaining to its Android mobile OS (via Reuters ). The competition complaint was brought against Android back in February 2015 by local company Yandex — aka the “Google of Russia” — which had argued that Google’s contract for Android broke competition rules by requiring handset makers to pre-install various Google services in order to be able to access the app store. The original ruling was handed down by Russia’s FAS (Federal Antimonopoly Service) last September. Google appealed the ruling, but today the Moscow Arbitration court rejected the company’s appeal — upholding FAS’ judgment that Google’s practices broke Russian law by leading to the “prohibition of pre-installation of apps of other producers.” Google will now be required to amend its contract with OEMs in Russia to comply with the ruling. Asked for its reaction to losing the appeal, a Google spokesperson said: “We’re not commenting as we have not yet received the judgment.” A spokesman for Yandex said: “After careful consideration of all the facts in the case against Google’s anticompetitive practices, the court has upheld FAS’s judgement. We are satisfied with the court’s decision to uphold FAS’s judgement in the case against Google.” While this antitrust ruling only applies to Google’s Android-related business practices to Russia, the European competition commission is also considering similar charges against Android in Europe as a whole — in addition to formally probing the company’s search comparison practices. Last October, Europe’s antitrust commissioner, Margrethe Vestager, described the Google Android investigation as a “high priority” for her department. Complainants in that instance say Google uses Android’s platform dominance like a “Trojan horse” to drive adoption of its services, squeezing out competing apps which — unlike Google’s apps and services — require users to discover and download them. Analysts peg Android’s global share of the smartphone market at around 80 percent , with Apple’s iOS in a distant second place — giving Google huge power to de facto dictate which apps and services smartphone users discover. 2016-03-14 20:16 Natasha Lomas

54 #CSForAll: Ensuring tech access for all students On the heels of the White House Computer Science For All initiative (#CSForAll) announcement and the celebration of National Engineers Week , we are excited about the work being done to make STEM opportunities accessible for all kids. The #CSForAll initiative is a plan to ensure that every student in America has access to a robust and rigorous computer science education. The initiative includes a proposed $4.2 billion targeted toward teacher training, curriculum development and the strengthening of public-private partnerships. We applaud the White House’s commitment to ensuring that all students have access to high- quality computer science instruction so they can pursue computing-related studies and careers. It was surreal to watch President Obama dedicate the entirety of a weekly address to a topic we hold near and dear. A new day for computer science education has dawned; it is times like this that beg for both reflection and visioning. We’re at a turning point in the history of education, not only for students, but also for their teachers. Computer science education offers an unprecedented opportunity to impact the lives of students, equipping them with skills that lead to internships, college scholarships and a pathway toward fulfilling careers. Unfortunately, too many students — especially those from low-income areas — don’t have access to computer science courses in their schools. That’s a problem — not just for them, but for their communities and our nation. Currently, just one in four schools nationwide offers computer science classes. With 98 percent of all undergraduate computer science majors reporting exposure to the field prior to college, this disparity of early computer science experiences cuts promising students off from the many benefits the field has to offer. More kids need this experience. Low-income students and students of color in the United States do not receive the high-quality, rigorous computer science instruction needed for success in college and beyond. It’s important that we help expand access to computer science education for a diverse set of students, especially in our increasingly technological and interconnected world. Teachers can fix this. But, unfortunately, there aren’t enough computer science teachers. A recent Google/Gallup study revealed that school administrators view a lack of trained computer science teachers as a top barrier to offering computer science courses. It is important for more individuals with a background, or strong interest, in science and tech to consider teaching, and for schools to find innovative ways to incorporate computer science into their curricula. For us, teaching computer science was the most powerful way to combat educational inequity. Just six years ago, Cullen was a social studies teacher with a passion for tech. He entered the world of computer science education — without prior programming experience — because computer science teachers weren’t available for his students. His district gave him the opportunity to learn computer science concepts and earn certification. Because of this support, he had the privilege of introducing his students to a world of innovation and advancement through computer science. And for Claire, the lack of computer science courses at a Title I high school situated mere miles away from the world’s premier tech hub was shameful. The opportunity gap for her students — most of whom loved STEM — was obvious. Excuses as to why they could not offer a computer science class at a high school like hers were plentiful: We’ll never find a teacher who knows computer science and wants to work here; computer science is hard; the students don’t have computers available to do their homework; and, most misguidedly, we will never get students to sign-up. Emboldened by the doubters, Claire partnered with her school to make it happen. The first class defied all expectations; people generously donated old computers that students took home, and her class of 22 students, primarily young women, thought the class was hard, but ultimately excelled. The momentum created could not be contained by the four walls of Claire’s classroom. She searched for ways to increase student opportunity and ultimately landed a role leading computer science initiatives within the Oakland Unified School District. In this role, she now leads the charge of bringing the critical thinking, problem solving, agency and joy exemplified by the students in her own classroom to 50,000 young people in Oakland. President Obama’s commitment to computer science education is a justification of the work we spearhead to impact students at scale. We believe this focus on the PK-12 computer science continuum has the potential to reimagine teaching and learning. Computer science provides opportunities for project-based learning, collaboration and authentic, hands-on experiences. It has already forced educators like us to re-envision a teacher’s role in the classroom — from allowing students to drive their learning to helping students find their passion in this field. The time is now. And together, we can ensure that all of today’s students have the access and knowledge to become the innovators and pioneers of the future. 2016-03-14 20:16 Cullen White

55 Xbox Live now supports cross-platform multiplayer with PS4 At this point, there’s very little difference between the Xbox One and the PlayStation 4. But there was one key differentiating point. Xbox gamers could only play with Xbox and PC players as Microsoft was restricting access to the multiplayer component. Microsoft just announced that game developers can now create cross- platform multiplayer modes that work with other consoles and operating systems. So it means that the next Call of Duty or FIFA could feature a multiplayer mode that works with both Xbox and Playstation gamers. It just depends on developers now. Microsoft has historically restricted cross-platform play as the Xbox Live was the first successful multiplayer network for consoles. The PlayStation Network only appeared with the PlayStation 3. And yet, Microsoft is now lagging behind the PlayStation 4 with its Xbox One. There are more online players on competing platforms, and Microsoft is now the underdog. By opening up cross-platform multiplayer, Microsoft could convince late adopters to buy an Xbox One even though their friends have a PlayStation 4. It’s also a way to make sure that there are enough players for less popular games. The first game that is going to support cross-platform multiplayer is Rocket League. Microsoft mentions cross-platform multiplayer between the Xbox One and Windows, but you can also expect support for PlayStation gamers as well given that the current version of Rocket League supports cross-platform multiplayer between PlayStation 4 and PC players. It’s unclear how developers are supposed to deal with duplicated PlayStation Network and Xbox Live screen names. For PC games that were using Microsoft’s online framework, these games will also work with other operating systems, such as OS X. And finally, Xbox players will be able to restrict multiplayer modes to other Xbox players only, but it’s unclear why you’d do that except if you’re a hardcore Xbox fanboy. 2016-03-14 20:16 Romain Dillet

56 Google doubles max ChromeOS bug bounty to $100k After shelling out $2 million in rewards to security bounty hunters in 2015, Google announced today it is doubling the reward for reporting serious security flaws, raising the top bounty from $50,000 to $100,000. Google has been pretty serious about its security on Chrome; it has had a bug-hunting bounty in place since 2010, eligible to hackers who find vulnerabilities on , the Chrome browser and Chrome OS. The increase in the top-level reward program is aimed at “persistent compromise of a in guest mode.” In other words: A Chromebook that is hacked in guest mode, and remains hacked after a reboot. Google never had an opportunity to pay out the bounty when it stood at $50,000, but the wording of the target hints at why Google is making this type of exploit a priority: The company wants to get ahead of zero-day exploits. By increasing the bounty to $100,000 for the most egregious exploits, the company no doubt hopes it will be able to lure hackers its way so the Chrome team can resolve the issues, rather than letting more sinister forces buy access to the vulnerabilities. 2016-03-14 20:16 Haje Jan

57 Michael Goguen’s counter-complaint calls accuser an “exotic dancer” who was “looking for a payday” Michael Goguen, the longtime venture capitalist who was asked to leave Sequoia Capital following a stunning breach of contract complaint , has just filed a counter complaint in San Mateo County Court that proposes the accusations against him are a myth. In reaction to claims that Goguen sexually and emotionally abused a woman named Amber Laurel Baptiste for more than a decade, and then failed to follow through on an agreement to pay her $40 million to keep her claims confidential, Goguen is now countersuing Baptiste for extortion. He’s not holding any punches. In his countersuit, Goguen’s legal team paints a picture of a woman in love with him, and features a long list of text and email messages to underscore that depiction. Among them: “The love that I hold in my heart for you was instant. It is a perfect love. And to me it is the perfect way to love someone. It is forever and unconditional;” “I love our visits. I feel so blessed to have met you and have been able to maintain a special relationship with you. I can only hope that it continues;” “I know it feels really good when we are together and to me it feels so perfect and I never want to let go of you;” and “I miss you so Much [sic]. My Body Misses you so Much. I love you so Much.” The counter-complaint also features pictures that Baptiste had allegedly sent to Goguen of herself dressed in lacy lingerie. Goguen had joined Sequoia Capital in 1996, five years after getting his master’s degree in electrical engineering from Stanford. (He studied electrical engineering as an undergrad at Cornell.) In her complaint, Baptiste’s legal firm had written that Baptiste was abused by Goguen “sexually, physically and emotionally for over 13 years” and across three of his former marriages, beginning soon after she was brought to the U. S. as a “victim of human trafficking.” Her complaint provides excruciatingly detailed accusations of these alleged abuses, including “countless hours of forced sodomy, verbal abuse,” and other “demeaning rituals.” In a particularly disturbing characterization, Baptiste’s complaint states that Goguen severely injured her during sex, then left her to “seek emergency medical aid alone in a foreign country, nearly hemorrhaging to death.” But in Goguen’s counter-complaint, it says that, “Far from being ‘forcibly sodomized’ and ‘left bleeding alone on the floor of a hotel room . . . nearly hemorrhaging to death,’ the supposed [injury] was so minor that Mr. Goguen was unaware of it until Ms. Baptiste emailed him after the fact gushing about how wonderful the night was and noting that she was scheduled to have a ‘small surgery’ that was ‘not a big deal.'” “[Baptiste] wrote of that night: ‘I would never erase that night for anything. It was beautiful each and every moment;’ ‘The last night together was really incredible for me. I could feel so many things moving between us that I have not felt before. Hopefully I will feel you again soon.'” Goguen’s counter-complaint goes on to assert that once “scorned,” Baptiste’s tone changed dramatically. She began to make “malicious allegations” that “frightened Mr. Goguen—not only for what they would do to his personal and professional reputation, but also the devastation such allegations would wreak on his family. When faced with the false and libelous claims she has now asserted in this lawsuit, Mr. Goguen wanted Ms. Baptiste to leave him and his family alone, and felt that he had no choice but to pay her to accomplish this.” Indeed, it says Goguen “acquiesced” to the “$40 million that [Baptiste] was arbitrarily demanding ” on a variety of conditions, including that she “stay away from Mr. Goguen and stop her harassment.” According to his counter-complaint, however, after Goguen made the first of the four payments, for $10 million, “Ms. Baptiste resumed her campaign of harassment, sending thousands of text messages after signing the document, including ones that disparaged Mr. Goguen and his family and threatened to send him to jail unless he accelerated the payment schedule.” Baptiste’s complaint includes a copy of the agreement. It states that: “For a period of time, Amber and Michael were involved in a personal relationship. Amber had prepared and contemplated filing a lawsuit against Michael seeking monetary damages for personal injury and other claims arising from their prior relationship. Michael desires that all details relating to their relationship remain confidential, and Amber is willing to agree thereto. By signing this agreement, neither party is making any admission regarding any wrongdoing by that party.” It also states: “Michael specifically bargained for the confidentiality provisions in this agreement, and without them he would not have agreed to pay any amount of consideration to Amber.” The contract then outlines four payments totaling $40 million that would have been completed by this past December. Baptiste, who is characterized in Goguen’s cross-complaint as a Canadian native who in 2002 “entered into a sham marriage” to obtain her U. S. citizenship and now lives in L. A., is seeking the enforcement of that settlement agreement, along with attorney’s fees and other compensatory damages. Goguen is meanwhile seeking “compensation for all damages and losses caused by Ms. Baptiste’s extortion, including but not limited to return of the $10 million she extorted from him.” Goguen was asked to leave Sequoia last week. Reached Friday about Baptiste’s complaint, a Sequoia spokesman wrote us that, “We first learned of these claims [Thursday]. We understand that these allegations of serious improprieties are unproven and unrelated to Sequoia. Nevertheless, we decided that Mike’s departure was the appropriate course of action.” In Whitefish, Montana, where Goguen has a home, he has been a “hero” to many locals owing to his philanthropic efforts, says one source who vacations there. Among his local contributions: a trail system called The Whitefish Trail and two state-of-the-art helicopters furnished on behalf on the local search and rescue program. According to a recent report by a local outlet called the Flathead Beacon, Goguen has invested “untold millions more into an assortment of local causes and community investments, as well as business ventures,” including a local bar and a Montana company that produces rifles and barrels for the U. S. military. The article says that in 2014, Goguen further donated “$2 million over five years to the state’s Internet Crimes Against Children task force in an effort to protect kids from online predators.” “I don’t know what more can be said,” the chairman of a local non-profit told The Missoulian in 2012 of Goguen. “He’s a great and gracious guy. I’m impressed that a gentleman who’s been so successful in his professional career would find it in his heart to do this for the community. He’s a very modest and quiet man. He’s humble and soft-spoken.” The full counter-complaint can be found here . 2016-03-14 20:16 Connie Loizos

58 Netflix pulls its Android Beta Program, says it was not meant for consumers to join Netflix confirmed this morning the existence of what appeared to be a new Android beta testing program , but says it did not intend to make it available to consumers via Google Play. In addition, the company tells us that features in the beta app should not be taken as indication of those planned for forthcoming releases. That said, some testers had reported seeing the option for a “Mobile Data Saver” setting on their devices after joining. This was mistakenly reported to be a feature of the Netflix beta, but it’s actually a bucket test ahead of a broader iOS and Android launch. The data saver mode was earlier announced at Mobile World Congress 2016 as a forthcoming update that will launch on both the iOS and Android applications sometime this year. Reporters at MWC were allowed to preview the feature and take screenshots of it in action. Several users today say they’ve already spotted the option for a data saver mode appearing on their devices while streaming. However, Netflix tells us that the feature has not been publicly released on either Android or iOS, nor has the company announced when that will take place. Those who saw the option were a part of a test unrelated to the beta. The current, official release of the Android application only lets you choose whether streaming is limited to whether you’re on Wi-Fi or not, under the “Video Playback” options. There is no toggle for Mobile Data Saver in this section in the public release. However, seeing the feature pop up in the wild is promising in terms of a public release in the near term, as bucket tests tend to precede a larger rollout. In case you missed the news from MWC, the Mobile Data Saving feature is able to work out the best, most economical bandwidth and will allow users to reduce the video quality below full HD 1080p. There’s also a second button to allow HD to give you more control over your minimum quality levels for your streams, Netflix had told reporters. For users with limited mobile data plans, this would obviously be a big benefit, as it would allow them to watch more of Netflix’s shows and movies without worrying about going over their limits and then getting caught with a larger monthly bill. The beta program was first spotted by the blog Android Police. Initially, the blog said the data saver option was new in the beta, but has since corrected that statement as some readers told them they already had the feature on their device. Netflix said that the link for the beta program should be down, but it’s not sending users to a dead website. Instead, the message that appears simply says that the testing program “has enough testers” and isn’t accepting more sign-ups. It wouldn’t have been surprising to see Netflix running a beta program for consumers, so it’s understandable why some believed that to be the case. Today, a number of other major tech companies, including Facebook , Instagram , WhatsApp , Twitter , Microsoft , and others, offer ways for early adopters to try out new features not yet released to the public by optionally installing a beta build of their applications. 2016-03-14 20:16 Sarah Perez

59 Unlocking blockchain for the underbanked As 2015 came to a close and the new year began, many thought leaders in the financial technology space made their predictions on the trends and innovations that will get us excited in 2016. One of the most prominent technologies that repeatedly appeared on these lists was the blockchain. More familiarly known as the technology behind the bitcoin digital currency, blockchain has emerged from the shadows of bitcoin with a new, solo image. In an age when companies are looking for innovative ways to optimize internal processes, make and verify transactions and increase data management and security practices, the blockchain stands out as the candidate to solve their problems. Simply put, blockchain is a public ledger of transactions distributed among a large network of computers without a central authority. Bitcoin still remains the largest example of the blockchain technology, but there have been other examples of distributed ledgers springing up around the world. In bitcoin’s early years, using the blockchain on a large scale was just as strong a technology as a philosophy and belief in a new decentralized economy that would serve the masses. Hence, it’s no surprise that many startups in the space see that blockchain has a fitting case for financial inclusion to provide better, faster and cheaper financial services to those who are outside or heavily burdened by their local formal financial systems. At Accion Venture Lab , we have reviewed and spoken to a multitude of early-stage companies looking to use both bitcoin currency and the underlying blockchain technology to expand financial services throughout different emerging markets. Companies — like BigPagos, Bitex.la, Bitso, Volabit, Wayniloans and Blinktrade in Latin America; BitPesa, Atlas and Switchless in Africa; Coins.ph in Asia; and Abra and Allaire in the U. S. — are trying to tackle real problems and inefficiencies in the market, whether in payments, lending or remittances. In the mix of bitcoin and blockchain-only business models, we’ve repeatedly seen that the poor need a reason to care about bitcoin as a currency. Underserved customers won’t see benefits to using bitcoin for its inherent coolness; rather, they need it to simply and easily address a pain point or make their lives better. Bitcoin ends up being a complicated concept that, unless attached to a trusted fiat currency or local mobile money system, has no value. Unless there is an ecosystem in which bitcoin is accepted ubiquitously in an underbanked person’s world, is a regulated and trusted form of value and is easily accessible , it will mean very little to those without access to financial services. So, the question remains, how can the blockchain begin to have real meaning in the lives of the two billion excluded individuals around the world? There are a few ways we believe blockchain can help revolutionize access to financial services for the base of the pyramid in the near future. As mentioned previously, the cost of remitting money averages 8.4 percent globally, driven in large part by the legacy brick-and-mortar distribution networks and multi-bank settlement chains of incumbents like Western Union and MoneyGram. Using the bitcoin blockchain as a back-end to transact local currency provides a clear way to ensure that the customer can feel comfortable with the product, while also receiving the cost and technology benefits of the blockchain technology. Using the blockchain in this fashion will not only lead to more value accretion to remitting customers, but it will also be the kind of radical value proposition improvement that will be required to attract customers and break them from established habits around sending and receiving money. Similarly, the blockchain can be used in remittances to enhance pricing transparency and provide better transfer security, as well as be used as an on-ramp for other technology driven financial services. It’s important to also consider that while blockchain can help lower costs and smooth transactions, it alone does not make a company poised for complete success -– there are other huge components of a remittance startup that need to be taken into consideration, such as cash-in/cash-out points and a unique customer acquisition strategy. Property rights have long been a source of conflict and pain for many lower-income individuals. Formalizing property and expanding formal information networks for the base of the pyramid allows low-income property owners to enter the formal financial system and generate collateral for financial products; it also provides legal protections and visibility in the local formal economy. Companies like Suyo in Colombia and Landmapp in Africa are using innovative technologies to bring down the cost of land titling and formalization. While they are not using the blockchain to maintain their databases or connect with the local governments, there is a huge potential to do so. For example, decentralized record-keeping startup Factom has partnered with the government of Honduras on a new land title registry initiative to develop “a permanent and secure land title record system” using the bitcoin blockchain, the distributed ledger that tracks all land title transactions across the Central American nation. Similar to property rights, many base-of-the-pyramid individuals do not have access to traditional financial services because they lack verifiable identification. Governments and individuals alike understand the complex nature of identification, and while some low-income individuals prefer to remain anonymous, the systematic and individual costs of doing so remain very high. By using the blockchain, individuals can receive a digital identity for transacting value nationally and internationally with relative ease. For example, Bitnation is using blockchain to help solve the refugee identity crisis in Europe. Their system currently helps Syrians get an “emergency ID” in order to cryptographically prove individual identity and family relationships. Similarly, at Onename , usernames are created within an open namespace and user data is embedded directly into the blockchain to help individuals who want to voluntarily identify themselves, even when local governments make it difficult to do so. This would give those typically excluded from the financial system a way to potentially open their own bank account, send money across borders and even apply for loans. Users can voluntarily identify themselves via the blockchain, and may be granted access to health care, social services, job opportunities, and more. In addition to the above possibilities, we know there are more great ideas out there, and these are just a few as to how the blockchain could support the underbanked around the world. We have not invested in blockchain technology yet, but perhaps as all the experts have advised, this may be the year we find a worthwhile venture. 2016-03-14 20:16 Jackie Hyland

60 Google launches new services for Android game developers Google today announced a number of new services for game developers at its annual Developer Day at the Game Developers Conference. They include tools for managing virtual goods and currencies, the launch of the Video Recording API so developers can make it easier for players to stream and share videos to YouTube, and a new ad type that allows new players to trial a game for 10 minutes right from the mobile search results page. Google didn’t share all that many new numbers about games on Google Play today, but the company did say that the number of games reaching more than a million installs grew by 50 percent. The most interesting of these new features is probably the announcement of Google’s new “Search Trial Run Ads.” These new ads, which will launch in a few weeks, will allow users to stream a game right from the search results page without having to install it. All new players have to do is hit the “try now” button and the game will stream to the phone from Google’s servers. This trial period is limited to 10 minutes. After that, Google will prompt players to install the game from Google Play (and maybe pay for it). The concept here is similar to Google’s effort in streaming search results from some more static apps like Hotel Tonight when they offer the best results for a given search. Streaming content from games, though, is obviously a tougher challenge. As a Google spokesperson told me, that’s why this new feature will only appear for users who are connected to Wi-Fi. Other new advertising features in this update include support for portrait video ads and the ability to target ads to users who spent more than 30 minutes playing games (or who played any game) in the last 30 days. Chances are, after all, that these users are also the most likely to want to try a new game. Both of these features are scheduled to launch in the next few weeks. To help indie developers, Google is also adding a new “Indie Corner” to Google Play. The company says this new section will highlight “amazing games built by indie developers.” Developers who want to participate will have to submit their game for review — and the game has to be “awesome,” of course. The addition of Google’s new Video Recording API for game developers is probably the most interesting. With this, game developers will soon be able to allow players to stream their gaming sessions right to YouTube (hello, Twitch!). They can, of course, also record their games offline and share their videos to YouTube later on, too. This new API is slated for a public release “in the coming months.” Other new features announced today include the ability to update gameplay and game economy parameters in games in real time without having to upload a new version of an app to Google Play, as well as a new service that gives developers the ability to predict which users are most likely to spend money in their games (or drop out). 2016-03-14 20:16 Frederic Lardinois

61 AMD shows off next-generation Polaris 10 GPU, architecture roadmap at GDC 2016 During AMD's GDC 2016 keynote, the company showed off a next-generation GPU from their upcoming Polaris line. Known as the Polaris 10, this new GPU is built using a 14nm FinFET manufacturing process, and fully supports emerging technologies like DirectX 12 and virtual reality. The showcase at GDC involved Hitman running at 1440p, 60 FPS, although quality settings weren't mentioned. For comparison, a top-end Nvidia GeForce GTX 980 Ti is able to run Hitman at just below 60 FPS at 1440p on maximum quality settings, so it seems Polaris 10 is quite powerful. AMD claims their Polaris architecture has "industry-leading performance-per-watt", and they've backed that up with some statistics. An unspecified Polaris GPU running Star Wars Battlefront on medium settings at 1080p 60 FPS consumed just 86W, compared to Nvidia's Maxwell- based GeForce GTX 950 which used 140W at the same settings. AMD also revealed their roadmap for future GPU architectures, including "Vega" in early 2017 with HBM2 (expected to be an extension to Polaris), and "Navi" in 2018 with next-generation memory. As the main focus for AMD at present is Polaris, the company isn't detailing either of these architectures just yet. 2016-03-14 20:15 Tim Schiesser

62 Cortana can be set as default SMS client in latest internal Windows 10 Mobile build Last week, we reported that Microsoft is internally testing Windows 10 for PCs build 14283, which includes extensions for Edge. It appears that the current Mobile build that's being tested is 14288 and it contains the ability to set Cortana as the default SMS client. According to the report , while Cortana can be used as the default SMS client, the feature doesn't really work. It stated that in their testing, when they received an SMS message with this setting, they still had to use the Messaging + Skype app to read it. We'll find out more about what Microsoft has in store for Redstone at their annual developer conference, Build, at the end of the month. Source: Plaffo via MSPU 2016-03-14 19:56 Richard Woods

63 John Oliver explains the Apple vs FBI fight in the way that only he can John Oliver's latest topic on his show Last Week Tonight is the Apple vs FBI encryption battle , and he explained it in the way that only he can. Comedy has always been a fantastic way to help people understand things. He references the Crypto Wars, showing that two decades ago - the last time the government wanted a back door for encryption - hackers were able to infiltrate the encryption. Oliver does a great job of explaining the situation, showing Tim Cook's response, as well as government officials'. He also notes that it's clearly not an issue of "just this one time", saying, "Nobody seriously believes that is going to happen". Here's a few gems from the video: Image via Daily News 2016-03-14 19:32 Richard Woods

64 Icelandic Pirate Party leading in national polls A new poll has found that if Iceland was to vote today that the Pirate Party would emerge as the biggest party in parliament. The results show that other parties hoping to undermine the Pirate Party would not have enough seats to form a coalition government. The poll from media company 365 suggests that the pirates would secure 38.1% of the vote, giving it by far the largest amount of seats in parliament. The second largest party, according to the poll, is The Independence Party, coming in at 27.6%. The Independence Party is currently in a coalition government with the Progressive Party, who in the latest polls has been hit hard. The polls show they've gone from 24.4% at the time of the election to just 12.8% in the latest poll. With Icelandic elections taking place next spring, the Pirates' main task will be to stop their decline in popularity which was noticeable in this poll. In a January poll, 41.8% of those asked said they would vote for the Pirate Party if an election was held that month. That figure has now dropped to 38.1%. To win an overall majority, they need to secure 32 seats in the country's national parliament. With their current polling position, they would get 26 of the seats. In 2013, shortly after the Snowden revelations, a co-founder of the Icelandic Pirate Party - Helgi Hrafn Gunnarsson - introduced a bill into parliament which would have granted Edward Snowden Icelandic citizenship. It ultimately failed, due to the Pirate Party's weak position in the parliament at the time. Pirate parties have sprung up all around the world and have seen members get elected in a number of European countries to various parliaments. Pirate parties all typically share common interests including copyright reform, information privacy , and net neutrality. Source: Visir via The Reykjavik Grapevine | Image via Piratpartiet / Wikimedia 2016-03-14 19:18 Paul Hill

65 Russian court deals major blow to Google in anti-trust case regarding Android bundling Google has a lot on its legal plate at the moment. After a ruling in 2015 by a Russian court that held the company as guilty of abusing its market dominance in the country , Google filed an appeal to Moscow's Arbitration Court, which has been dismissed earlier today. The company was already in hot water in 2015, with authorities in the European Union starting an investigation into Google's antitrust practices related to its privileged position in the EU web search marke t , which the company believed to be a case of, "We don't always get it right. " Just a few months later, Russian search engine company Yandex filed a successful complaint against Google, in which it argued that the company was making it mandatory for Android device makers to include its own apps, and actively prohibited some of them from installing Yandex products, which means that Google was stifling its competition. Russia's Federal Anti-monopoly Service (FAS) had initially ruled that Google's practices regarding the app bundling on Android were in direct violation of the country's law on "Protection of the competition", a ruling that Moscow's Arbitration Court has upheld today when it dismissed Google's appeal: The ruling means that Google will have to 'tweak' its business contracts with smartphone makers in the country to allow them to bundle the apps of their choosing or else face a fine, should it fail to comply. A Yandex representative told VentureBeat that: Even if Google manages to save face after this ruling, it still isn't out of the legal frying pan just yet. There are signs of increasing opposition to Google's anti-competitive practices in other markets , and there are also a couple more bumps in the road in Russia, such as dealing with the country's censorship laws , as well as more aggressive taxation. Source: VentureBeat 2016-03-14 19:02 Adrian Potoroaca

66 Multiple Silicon Valley technology giants are working to strengthen encryption As tensions heighten in the ongoing San Bernardino i Phone encryption case , some of Silicon Valley's top technology companies are said to be bolstering their own security measures. The Guardian has it on good authority that WhatsApp is planning to encrypt in-app voice calls as it does with its secure messaging service in the coming weeks. Facebook, which purchased WhatsApp for around $19 billion in 2014, is also said to be considering tighter security for its self-branded Messenger app. Rival messaging service Snapchat is working on a secure messaging service as well, the publication said, adding that Google is looking into other uses for the technology behind an encrypted e-mail project. The report notes that engineers at several major technology players such as Twitter have looked into encrypted messaging products in the past. Unfortunately, many of those products were never fully developed as such products can sometimes be difficult to use or companies focused efforts on other consumer-facing projects instead. Now that encryption is such a hotbed issue, technology executives now view it as a legitimate business advantage rather than mere marketing fluff. It's worth pointing out that the publication claims the various encryption projects were in motion before Apple went to court with the Department of Justice regarding the aforementioned San Bernardino incident. The results of that case are still pending. Lead image via Drew Angerer, Getty Images 2016-03-14 18:45 Shawn Knight

67 AMD announces Radeon Pro Duo graphics card alongside more VR initiatives As part of AMD's GDC 2016 keynote, the company has announced a brand new graphics card: the long-awaited Radeon Pro Duo with what appears to be two Fury-class Fiji GPUs on the one board. The press release for the Radeon Pro Duo is a bit light on details, but everything does point to this card being the rumored "Radeon R9 Fury X2. " Instead of slotting this card into the Fury line, AMD is positioning it as the "most powerful platform for virtual reality", allowing users to both create and consume VR content on this dual- GPU solution. What AMD has revealed is that the Radeon Pro Duo is capable of 16 TFLOPS of compute performance, which is around double that of the Radeon R9 Nano. This graphics card is designed to be heavily used alongside AMD's LiquidVR technology, which helps optimize VR games and content for AMD's GPU architectures to ensure the best experience. Judging by images of the graphics card, the Radeon Pro Duo uses a closed-loop liquid cooling solution similar to the R9 Fury X, but in a card that's much longer to accommodate both GPUs. You'll also notice the card requires three eight-pin PCIe power connectors, while the I/O shield includes two DisplayPorts and two HDMI ports. The Radeon Pro Duo is also the first product in AMD's new 'VR Ready Creator' line, and it's a key piece of hardware in Crytek's new VR First initiative that aims to bring VR development on CryEngine to colleges and universities through dedicated VR labs. AMD is a major partner in Crytek's VR First program, and any new labs will be equipped with Radeon Pro Duos. If you're thinking about buying the Radeon Pro Duo, it won't be cheap: AMD has listed a price of $1,499 for this graphics card when it becomes available in Q2 2016. This is the very same price as the Radeon R9 295X2 from the previous generation, and it comes in at around $200 more than buying two standalone Radeon R9 Fury X cards and running them in Crossfire. As for AMD's other VR initiatives, the company has announced the " VR Ready Premium " designation that's designed to make it easier for consumers to pick a graphics card that is capable of running VR games. The label will apply to all "certified" Radeon R9 290-class GPUs and higher, as well as any systems that are built using these cards, such as HP's Envy Phoenix. The "VR Ready Creator" designation, which only applies to the Radeon Pro Duo at this stage, is meant to designate "unprecedented performance and industry-leading innovation" to assist with the development of VR content along with regular VR consumption. We're still waiting on more information about the Radeon Pro Duo, so we'll update this post as AMD's GDC keynote gets underway. 2016-03-14 18:00 Tim Schiesser

68 Microsoft updates Skype for Web with new features including notifications, YouTube support Last June, Microsoft launched Skype for Web , making it easy for users of its messaging platform to start chats and voice or video calls in a web browser window on any computer without needing to install an app. Today, the company delivered a significant update to its web experience, bringing a range of features that it says its users have been asking for. You can now make calls to mobile phones and landlines from the web interface, as long as you've got enough Skype credit - or an active calling subscription - to allow you to do so. The company has also introduced the ability to watch YouTube videos that are shared with you without leaving Skype . You can now add new people to a conversation, even if they're not on Skype , mirroring similar functionality in the Windows desktop client. Those you invite don't need to be Skype users because, as Microsoft points out, "they can join your conversation as a guest using Skype for Web". And perhaps the most useful new addition is that of notifications, "so that you'll never miss an important IM, call or a friend sending you a picture of their new kitten". Microsoft says that Skype for Web notifications will appear "even if you're in another browser tab or another app". As ever, the company promises that more features are on the way "in the coming weeks and months", but for now, you can try out the latest improvements to Skype for Web here . Source: Skype Blogs 2016-03-14 17:50 Andy Weir

69 Microsoft unveils an all-new sharing experience for OneDrive.com Today, Microsoft has unveiled a new, simpler sharing experience for OneDrive.com. The new experience gets rid of the old "Invite People" and "Get a link" options and replaces them with two icons with the options to "Get a link" or "Email". The company said today in a blog post: The user can also click "More" and be presented with a number of options to share to various social networks. According to Microsoft, the goal was to be "not as messy" by showing the two most popular options for sharing. They did an A/B test with 28,000 users and, not surprisingly, it was a success. Source: OneDrive Blog 2016-03-14 17:34 Richard Woods

70 Microsoft cuts price of BLU Win HD LTE to $109 - but you can get it elsewhere for $89.99 Microsoft is running all sorts of promotional deals at the moment - including $100 off some Surface Pro 4 models , 31.4% off select Dell notebooks , free games with Xbox One bundles, and huge discounts on desktops and laptops from various manufacturers . As part of its Spring Sale promotion, Microsoft today launched a generous 27% discount on the BLU Win HD LTE in the United States, hacking $40 off its regular Microsoft Store price of $149, bringing it down to just $109. The Win HD LTE includes some pretty solid specs in that price range, including: BLU also confirmed last year that Windows 10 Mobile would be coming to the device - although given the seemingly endless delays to Microsoft's rollout of that upgrade, it's far from clear when that will actually happen. Bizarrely, the Microsoft Store claims to be the exclusive retailer offering the Win HD LTE in blue in the US - but it's evidently not. You can get the device in blue - along with the same white, grey and yellow options available from Microsoft - at Amazon instead, where you'll pay a good deal less for it too. Amazon.com is currently selling the handset for just $89.99 with free shipping options, including those under Amazon Prime. There's no doubting that Microsoft's price for the Win HD LTE is an attractive one, but there's also no denying the appeal of saving an extra $19 when purchasing the affordable device. Still, if you really want to pay more at the Microsoft Store, you've only got a few days to do so - the offer is due to end on March 19. Source: Microsoft Store / Amazon.com 2016-03-14 17:02 Andy Weir

71 Numerex reports 4Q loss ATLANTA (AP) _ Numerex Corp. (NMRX) on Monday reported a fourth-quarter loss of $2.4 million, after reporting a profit in the same period a year earlier. The Atlanta-based company said it had a loss of 13 cents per share. Losses, adjusted for asset impairment costs, came to 8 cents per share. The wireless software maker posted revenue of $18.8 million in the period. For the year, the company reported a loss of $19.2 million, or $1 per share, swinging to a loss in the period. Revenue was reported as $89.5 million. Numerex shares have fallen 9 percent since the beginning of the year. In the final minutes of trading on Monday, shares hit $5.84, a decrease of 48 percent in the last 12 months. This story was generated by Automated Insights ( http://automatedinsights.com/ap ) using data from Zacks Investment Research. Access a Zacks stock report on NMRX at http://www.zacks.com/ap/NMRX Keywords: Numerex, Earnings Report 2016-03-14 16:53 CNBC

72 Xbox loves PS4: Cross-network play coming to Xbox One and Windows 10 Chris Charla, director of ID@Xbox, posted an open letter today, outlining new features, updates, and goals. The most surprising of the news is cross-network play, which could allow gamers to finally be able to play with their PS4-owning friends. Here's what he said: Many expected features like this to appear on Microsoft's own titles, particularly Minecraft, but it would appear that all developers will be able deliver to this feature. Of course, cross-network play is only a small part of what Charla announced today. He also announced MonoGame support. Also, Charla stated some goals, including the continuation of the Xbox Game Preview program, creating a sustainable marketplace, and to bring ID@Xbox to Windows 10. In the meantime, gamers can rejoice, as you will finally be able to use your Xbox One to kill PS4 owners...in Call of Duty. Source: Xbox News via Thurrott 2016-03-14 16:48 Richard Woods

73 Does closing all apps on your smartphone improve battery life? Android and iOS experts chime in Most semi-tech savvy smartphone users will tell you that closing all of the "open" apps on your device will lead to better battery life. As it turns out, the practice is little more than a common misconception according to Android and iOS experts. Quartz technology reporter Mike Murphy recently asked Hiroshi Lockheimer, SVP of Android, Chrome and Chrome OS, if closing apps on Android helped with battery life. Lockheimer replied earlier today, pointing out that Android is optimized for managing what's running and that messing with it would just cause more "thrash. " Thrash , in the context of storage, refers to overworking a storage medium by excessively moving information between a device's physical system memory and virtual memory. Or as Murphy concludes, frequently closing apps for no reason may actually slow down your device. @mcwm @MarcusDPK @pierce @qz in general better to let the system do its job; it was designed to manage running apps so you don't have to Just to clarify, Murphy asked Lockheimer if it was better to just leave everything open (assuming an app hadn't crashed). The Android expert said the system was designed to manage running apps so you don't have to and that yes, it's better in general to let the system do its job. Does the same hold true for iOS? Here's what Apple's head of software, Craig Federighi, had to say on the matter. A 9to5Mac reader recently e-mailed CEO Tim Cook, asking if he quit his iOS multitasking apps frequently and if it's necessary to help with battery life. Federighi replied to the message (the headers were verified, the publication says) and in short, he said "No and No. " So there you have it. Unless you have an app that has crashed or is otherwise causing problems, there's no benefit (and maybe even some harm) to force-closing apps. 2016-03-14 16:45 Shawn Knight

74 Check out the official trailer for Automatron, the first Fallout 4 DLC Bethesda wants to make sure you don't forget about Fallout 4 anytime soon. The publisher on Monday released an official trailer for Automatron, the first of three announced expansion packs set to arrive in 2016. In Automatron, players turn their attention to the mysterious Mechanist, an entity that has released an army of evil robots into the Commonwealth. Gamers will be tasked with hunting down and taking out the robots including the devious Robobrain. The decommissioned bots can then be salvaged for parts, allowing players to mix and match various components to build their own custom robot companions. Simply put, if you love robots and / or Fallout 4, you probably won't want to miss this DLC. Automatron arrives on the PlayStation 4, Xbox One and Steam on March 22 priced at $9.99. Those that purchased the season pass won't incur any additional fees although hopefully, you did so before March 1 as the price of the season pass shot up by $20 starting this month. As a reminder, anyone that wants to help beta test Fallout 4's DLCs can sign up for early access over on Bethesda's website. Do note that you'll need a registered Bethesda.net account to participate. Gamers that get approved for the beta will receive a code (presumably via e-mail) to join the fun. 2016-03-14 15:45 Shawn Knight

75 Microsoft AIX: Using Minecraft To Build Better AI Microsoft unveiled Monday an artificial intelligence platform called AIX that relies on its popular Minecraft game. The Redmond giant is the latest tech titan to use a game to further development of AI, joining IBM's Watson and Google's DeepMind AlphaGo . But in this particular case, Microsoft plans to open its platform to researchers and AI enthusiasts with an aim to move closer to having AI achieve the coveted "general intelligence" capabilities. General intelligence is on par with the way a baby learns by taking in their environment via sight, sound, smell, touch, discomfort, pleasure, and other information to make decisions effortlessly. But AI researchers to date have only been able to take small slices of that total awareness to build tools that do just one thing, such as recognize words, but have not been able to combine all the slices in a way that humans do without effort, said Katja Hofmann, a researcher at Microsoft's Cambridge, UK, lab who helped develop the AIX platform with her colleagues, in a blog post. That's partly due to the lack in understanding how people combine those senses, said Hofmann adding, "We don't understand ourselves well enough. " Enter Minecraft, which Microsoft acquired through its $2.5 billion purchase of Swedish game developer Mojang in 2014. Minecraft allows users to build their worlds however they wish. Because it affords users endless possibilities in the way they create their worlds, from scouring for treasures to erecting a building alone or with teammates, Hofmann said it made sense to use the open world of Minecraft when creating the AIX platform. Hofmann and her team are trying to train an AI agent, similar to one used in Minecraft, to climb to the highest point in the virtual world without knowing how to do it or what needs to be accomplished. "We're trying to program it to learn, as opposed to programming it to accomplish specific tasks," Fernando Diaz, senior researcher in Microsoft's New York research lab, said in the blog post. Brian Blau, a research director for Gartner, agrees that games have a benefit for AI researchers. "Games are a natural platform for test-bedding AI technology. They are rich and diverse simulations of worlds, which could be similar to what we humans experience, or not. That openness makes game worlds and virtual reality worlds well suited for AI, as they can deliver a clear visual picture and one that can be experienced personally," Blau told InformationWeek. [Read Microsoft Open Sources Deep Learning, AI Toolkit On GitHub .] He also pointed out that Microsoft is using Minecraft as a showcase for many of its new technologies, the other one being augmented reality goggles HoloLens . Additionally, Blau noted, "Using AI has been a cornerstone of non-player game character animation and behavior technology for many years, but it's not at the same level of sophistication as what today's (DNN/AI/GPU-powered) learning systems can achieve. " AIX has been used by Microsoft's researchers for their own projects. To date, a small group of academic researchers have been able to test it via a private beta. But this summer the Redmond giant will make AIX available under an open-source license. The platform uses a mod for the Java version and code that the AI agents need to sense and act in the Minecraft environment. Researchers and AI enthusiasts will be able to run these two components on Windows, Mac OS, or Linux. They can also select the programming language of their choice. 2016-03-14 15:36 Dawn Kawamoto

76 Microsoft to allow Xbox One, PC gamers to play online against PS4 owners Microsoft on Monday said it is enabling cross- network play on the Xbox One and Windows 10 meaning Xbox Live users may soon be able to play online multiplayer games against PlayStation 4 and other PC network users. The incredibly popular Rocket League will be one of the first games to support the new feature, Charla added. Microsoft has toyed with cross-platform multiplayer in the past with the Xbox 360 and the PC. While some games like Lost Planet did ship with the feature, Microsoft reportedly killed the project as even mediocre PC gamers were destroying the best console gamers in testing. As a general rule of thumb, a keyboard and mouse afford much higher levels of precision and accuracy than a traditional gamepad. That said, it'll be interesting to see how developers handle control mechanics this time around (assuming of course that they even attempt to level the playing field). A keyboard and mouse may not be as advantageous in some games but genres like first-person shooters, for example, are almost always an exception. More importantly, we'll see if Sony responds to the invitation at this week's Game Developers Conference which runs through Wednesday in San Francisco. 2016-03-14 14:45 Shawn Knight

77 Microsoft is offering 31.4% off Dell's XPS 13 laptop to celebrate Pi Day For those who don’t know, today is National Pi Day (3/14). As a way of celebrating everyone’s favorite irrational number, Microsoft is offering a 31.4 percent discount on Dell’s XPS 13 2016 Edition laptop when bought from its store . The Pi-based discount only applies to the entry- level Core i5 non-touch model, taking its price down to $685.31 from $999. Other XPS 13 variants are getting discounts of $200; this means you can get your hands on a top-end i7 model with 16GB of RAM for $1799 instead of $1999. The 31.4 percent Pi Day discount is also being applied to Dell’s Inspiron 13 2-in-1 and Inspiron 15 laptop , which will be available for $685.31 and $513.81 respectively. The three Pi discounts cover the Microsoft Signature Edition laptops, meaning they come with a reduced amount of bloatware. Today also brings a promotion for the Raspberry Pi; anyone who buys a Raspberry Pi 2 Model B bundled with an 8GB MicroSD card will receive a free Pi 2 Power Supply. In addition to the Pi Day discounts, Microsoft has now started its spring sale. Some of the offers include $100 off the 128GB and 256GB i5 versions of the Surface Pro 4, as well as money-off several other PCs, monitors, and accessories. Those looking to pick up a Xbox One, meanwhile, will be able to get $100 off the Kinect bundle. There’s also a deal where buyers of Microsoft’s console will receive Grand Theft Auto V and another game free with select bundles. The Pi deals are only for today, and the spring sale discounts will continue as long as stocks last. 2016-03-14 13:45 Rob Thubron

78 Flash is rocketing into big-data analytics At one time, all-flash storage arrays were used for a single mission-critical application with a need for speed, usually in big IT shops. Now they're poised to take over many more parts of IT. Systems are being scaled down and tuned to the requirements of medium-sized enterprises, while larger, petabyte-scale flash platforms are about to take on big-data number crunching with unprecedented performance. Falling costs are the main reason. Flash media gets cheaper as it packs more bits into the same amount of space, so its speed advantage over spinning disks is within reach for more enterprises. And at larger scale, it boosts data-center efficiency in ways that can multiply the savings. Pure Storage has been one of the most fervent promoters of this trend. All its products have been all-flash since the company's founding in 2009. On Monday, Pure is upping its game to address large-scale analytics workloads as well as reaching out to enterprises that haven't been able to afford all-flash systems before. At its inaugural Pure//Accelerate user conference in San Francisco, Pure is announcing the FlashBlade, a platform designed to store petabytes of unstructured data, like images and social media posts. The FlashBlade is aimed at emerging applications that require fast access to data for almost real-time decision-making. This is the kind of technology an athletic-wear company needs to deliver product offers related to the star players in a soccer match that's still being played, said IDC analyst Eric Burgener. It allows the manufacturer to analyze social media posts to determine whose shoes to promote. The system is in beta testing now and should ship commercially by early next year, Pure says. Among the beta testers are car companies using it for things like airflow simulations. Another early adopter is a Web site that takes in media posted by users, rapidly transcodes it and analyzes it, then makes it available for others to view. There are ways to do big-data analytics with current flash technology, but the FlashBlade and other emerging products, including EMC's recently announced DSSD D5 array, are purpose- built for the task and should make it easier to manage, Burgener said. The FlashBlade will pack 1.6PB of effective capacity in a 4U (7-inch-high) rack unit. In-line compression and deduplication help it achieve that density. Users can scale out the FlashBlade by adding more nodes, gaining both capacity and computing power along the way. The nodes connect over 40-Gigabit Ethernet. The system uses pure flash media, not SSDs (solid-state drives), and a single software base that runs everything, including flash controller functions and software-defined networking between the nodes. That code runs on standard x86 processors. Pure's big-data launch comes just weeks after EMC's DSSD D5 announcement. One difference between the platforms is that EMC is using NVME (non-volatile memory express) instead of Ethernet to interconnect systems. That's likely to give Pure a price advantage, said Gartner analyst Joe Unsworth. Pure says the FlashBlade will cost less than $1 per gigabyte of effective storage, closer than ever to the cost of hard disk drives. But at petabyte scale, flash gets even cheaper than arrays of spinning disks, all things considered, analysts say. Flash takes less energy and data-center space, a difference that starts to add up when there's a lot of data to accommodate. In addition, flash feeds data to servers so quickly they don't have to wait for the bits to process, so companies don't need as much computing capacity, IDC's Burgener said. Also on Monday, Pure is introducing the FlashArray//m10, a scaled-down version of its standard array. The system will have as much as 30TB of usable capacity and cost less than $50,000. It can be upgraded to the FlashArray//m20 and larger systems as a company's needs grow. The FlashArray//m10 will also form the basis of the FlashStack Mini, a converged infrastructure system that bundles it with servers and virtualization software from either VMware or Microsoft. The 9U systems will start at less than $100,000. The array and the converged systems will ship in June. 2016-03-14 12:27 Stephen Lawson

79 Brain boxes: Microsoft is using Minecraft to teach artificial intelligence Microsoft has revealed Project AIX, an open source platform designed to test out and help hone artificial intelligence (AI) using Minecraft. It's currently in closed beta but should be made broadly available this summer. When Microsoft bought up Mojang , you probably wondered what Redmond was going to do with Minecraft – and you probably didn't guess that one usage of the popular sandbox game would be to train artificial intelligence routines. The idea is based around the fact that playing Minecraft is a learning process, and just as a human has to become familiar with the nuances of the game when they sit down in front of it and play (without reading the manual – as come on, who does that?), so an AI can learn from Mojang's block-building epic. As Microsoft observes in a blog post , the artificial intelligence starts off knowing nothing about its in-game environment or goals, and has to stumble about working things out. The AI has to learn about climbing hills, avoiding lava, the importance of light and dark, and eventually understand rewards and goals, all using the same type of methods and resources a human would. In other words, this isn't about having an AI be able to demonstrate that it can successfully play a game – but rather, that it can genuinely learn to play said game. Or as Fernando Diaz, a senior researcher on the project put it: "We're trying to program it to learn, as opposed to programming it to accomplish specific tasks. " Minecraft was chosen as ideal for helping to test and develop AI because it's such a huge open- world game with a vast array of possible actions and complicated decisions. The collaborative side of the game is also a major plus when it comes to experimenting with how AIs might work together (or indeed work with humans). And of course testing AI inside a game has obvious advantages in terms of cost effectiveness. If you build a real-world robot that has to climb up a hill, and it makes a mistake, falls over and breaks something – that's a costly repair. Whereas an AI blundering around inside a virtual world won't cost you anything save the power you're using to keep the hardware on. It's hoped that Project AIX will help to push computers forward in terms of developing 'general intelligence', i.e. the more nuanced way humans learn to make decisions combining all manner of different factors and senses in a manner that's extremely difficult to begin to emulate. As for the AIX platform itself, it consists of a Minecraft mod with code bolted on that allows AI agents to sense and act within the game environment, and it can be run across Windows, OS X or Linux. Minecraft is of course being used to teach kids as well, with the Minecraft Education Edition set to be pushed out this summer, a revamped version of MinecraftEdu which adds a number of new features. Via: PC World Article continues below 2016-03-14 12:10 By Darren

80 New NPM will simplify React JavaScript development The Enclave NPM module currently under development will offer smoother project setup in Facebook's React JavaScript UI library. Enclave provides an NPM for compiling JSX and ECMAScript 2015 code into "browser-ready" JavaScript. It takes developers through a series of prompts, creating an enclave.js file in an application's root that will be used by Enclave to reference a build. The project arose out of what its developer describes as complexity in configuring React applications with Webpack and Babel, and the experience with compile-to-JavaScript applications like Elm and CoffeeScript . "I developed Enclave because after a year of doing React professionally, I still wasn't comfortable setting up a new project," developer Ean Platter, a software engineer at TechnologyAdvice, said. "It was tedious and frankly just not worth the effort. A lot of Web developers aren't used to having to worry about compiling their code, they just drop in a CDN and it's ready to go. " The eventual goal with Enclave is to maintain a "sane" API that's less reliant on Webpack. "All in all, this is open experimentation. Hopefully if you're wanting to get started with React you'll find Enclave is a helpful tool to get you up and running quickly," the project's GitHub page states. TechnologyAdvice, which builds SaaS products and uses React for front-end development, started building Enclave within the past two weeks. "Just as Enclave is to help give people frictionless entry into building React applications, we want the contributing process to be as frictionless, especially for folks wanting to get into open source," Platter said. As such, he wants to keep Enclave's code and its API as unambiguous as possible, but more structure is needed. "There's a lot of low-hanging fruit for developers interested in contributing. " Despite the difficulties, Platter remains a fan of React. "The biggest thing that keeps me tied to React is the fact that it's not HTML-centric. You're writing JSX (HTML-like markup) in your.js files, which means you can pretty much do anything. " 2016-03-14 11:44 Paul Krill

81 Dropbox takes the reins, moves off AWS and onto its own infrastructure After years of relying on the Amazon cloud to store its users' files, Dropbox has shifted and begun using primarily its own technology instead. "We're excited to announce that we're now storing and serving over 90 percent of our users' data on our custom-built infrastructure," the company said in a blog post Monday. Dropbox stores two kinds of data: file content, and metadata about files and users. The service always had a hybrid architecture, whereby metadata was stored on Web servers in its own data centers while file content was stored on Amazon. Growth prompted Dropbox to start building its own storage system back in 2013, leading to an initial launch in early 2015. By October, it had hit its goal of serving 90 percent of its data from its in-house infrastructure. Performance and the need for customization were key motivators for the move. "We knew we'd be building one of only a handful of exabyte-scale storage systems in the world," the company said. "It was clear to us from the beginning that we'd have to build everything from scratch, since there's nothing in the open source community that's proven to work reliably at our scale. " Dropbox will continue to partner with Amazon when warranted, particularly globally. Later this year, it plans to expand its relationship with AWS to store data in Germany for European business customers. For the most part, users shouldn't notice anything different as a result of the shift. "Their files will sync with the same reliability as before across all of their devices, and as Dropbox adds more users, that performance standard should hold," said T. J. Keitt, a senior analyst with Forrester Research. The bigger implications are strategic ones. "The upstart cloud companies that have built their own global-scale infrastructure are Amazon, Facebook and Google -- companies that deal with billions of transactions and millions of users," Keitt said. "It seems that Dropbox feels that its arrow's pointed in that direction and it can't be constrained by someone else's infrastructure. " While Netflix has gone "all-in" with Amazon Web Services, Dropbox seems to believe that infrastructure isn't a utility or a commodity, he said. Rather, "they see it as a core enabler of their evolving ambitions to move past being an interesting file-synchronization system to a collaboration platform ready to compete with Google and Microsoft in both the consumer and enterprise arenas. " The move also flies in the face of many commonly held assumptions about the public cloud, including notions that it's "virtually always cheaper, easier and better for a company than owning and operating its own IT assets," said Charles King, principal analyst with Pund-IT. "Though Dropbox is an extreme case in regards to the size and scope of its new storage infrastructure, it's not unique in recognizing the strategic and economic benefits of controlling its own IT destiny," King said. Amazon did not immediately respond to a request for comment. 2016-03-14 10:23 Katherine Noyes

82 Microsoft drops Bitcoin support for Windows 10 and Windows 10 Mobile purchases Microsoft's love affair with Bitcoin has proved to be short-lived. The company has updated its support pages to indicate that it no longer supports the cryptocurrency for purchases made in the Microsoft Store. No explanation has been given for the decision, but it's likely that Bitcoin 's failure to hit the mainstream -- yet, at least -- is to blame. From now on, Windows 10 and Windows 10 Mobile purchases will have to be made using other payment methods, although Microsoft says current balances paid for with Bitcoin can still be used. Update -- Microsoft has said that the announcement was made in error and has issued a statement to that affect . The announcement has come out of the blue, but at the same time it's not entirely surprising. Bitcoin has earned itself something of a bad reputation by association recently, being the currency of choice for extortion of money with ransomware. While it is possible that this has played a part in Microsoft's decision, slow adoption rates of the cryptocurrency are more likely to blame. A simple, to-the-point page on the Microsoft site says : With that in mind, if you do have a Bitcoin-funded balance, take care what you choose to spend it on as it seems there will be no chance of getting your money back. Photo credit: 3Dsculptor / Shutterstock 2016-03-14 10:13 By Mark

83 80 percent of internet users believe privacy is a fundamental right People care more about their privacy than ever before according to the latest Consumer Openness Index by open source messaging and office productivity company OpenXchange , with 80 percent believing they have a right to privacy. The survey of 3,000 Internet users in the US, UK and Germany shows that over the past year, public opinions about data privacy have hardened. The internet-aware public in all regions surveyed are more likely to say they would stop using websites and services if news of a privacy scandal broke. The number of people who believe that technology companies never have the right to share their personal data is also up, to 57 percent of internet users surveyed. However, nearly one in three respondents (31 percent) said that they didn't know if their personal data had ever been compromised. There are also increased demands for elected officials to take a stance to protect the privacy of data. In the US, 81 percent of respondents care about the presidential candidates' positions on data privacy, and a slight majority (51 percent) believe the candidates should pay more attention to it. Although the report finds significant confusion around the data privacy stances of individual candidates, the majority of Americans indicated that a candidate's position on data privacy would influence their vote. Across all three countries 64 percent of people believe the US election will impact privacy related government policy around the world. In addition 63 percent admit to being concerned about who in the government has access to their data. In the UK, 53 percent believe that the impact of the Investigatory Powers Bill -- a proposal that would increase the government's surveillance powers -- has not been adequately explained by Home Secretary Theresa May and lacks a balanced argument. Meanwhile in Germany, nearly half of respondents (46 percent) are in favor of the European Court of Justice's decision to invalidate Safe Harbor. "Governments and corporations are gathering unfathomable amounts of information about the online lives of every individual," says Rafael Laguna, CEO of Open-Xchange. "As a result, it's no surprise that across the world, people increasingly fear their personal data is exposed. Worse than that, recent studies have shown that people feel powerless to protect their data. But there is hope: there are signs that citizens believe that compromising their right to privacy can no longer be tolerated. They are asking for greater transparency in the services they use and the politicians they elect, and searching for solutions to protect themselves". The survey also shows that privacy worries have led to increased interest in ways to protect information. 88 percent of respondents say they would be interested in at least one encryption- related service, such as a one-click button that encrypts outgoing email, or encryption as a standard feature of applications. However, current encryption solutions don't fit the bill, either because they seem too complicated (28 percent), or they're not easy to incorporate (24 percent). You can find out more and download a copy of the report from the OpenXchange website . Photo credit: Pelykh Konstantin / Shutterstock 2016-03-14 10:09 By Ian

84 Guest View: Pre-built testing comes of age Software testing is changing for the better with the rise of agile and DevOps. Instead of testing occurring at the end of the development cycle, modern methods integrate testing into every step of the process. By moving testing earlier, using Test-Driven Development (TDD), features can be released immediately after passing automated tests. TDD is becoming integral in enabling Continuous Delivery or Deployment (CD), a popular agile concept. CD reimagines the traditional software development and deployment process, replacing the drawn out and coordinated phased approach with more frequent and accelerated activities around individual features. Beyond allowing features to release to customers more frequently, TDD can also increase developer productivity by avoiding developer scope creep, through the red-green-refactor cycle. The benefits of TDD can be tremendous, but it’s important to take thought and consideration into its adoption so that process, tools and people involved transition smoothly. TDD defined TDD is a novel approach to testing that flips testing from the end of the cycle to the beginning. To do so, it almost always requires defining and building an automated test before the developer writes any code. Once the test completes, the developer then writes a feature and continues to revise until it passes the test, providing instant feedback on the quality of the software being developed. TDD (and the complementary practice of Behavior-Driven Development) provides additional flexibility down the road to re-architect or refactor the software as it becomes inefficient. The automated tests needed to ensure that software continues to perform as expected have already been written and are ready to be rerun against the new code. On top of that, TDD separates features from each other so you can refactor and improve pieces of the application separately as you go. (Related: The huge role of automation in testing ) For legacy apps, TDD might be harder to introduce, due to the overwhelming number of automation tests that may need to be written to cover pieces of the software, which have already been implemented. But for new software being developed from scratch by agile teams, TDD is an ideal approach. Overcoming a few TDD challenges 1. Developer pushback. Logically, writing tests and performing them while code is being written makes a lot of sense. Developers can fix issues on the features they are currently writing, instead of waiting until after they’ve moved on to a different project and have changed gears mentally. Code is ready to go faster, and with in-progress assurances that it will work as expected for users. On the other hand, developers don’t often like to get mixed up in the process of testing. They are creative spirits, and may also resent being reined in to write the code exactly to pass the test. While some developers may hate the rigidity TDD enforces, others may be glad to avoid rewrites later. 2016-03-14 09:00 Kevin Dunne

85 Only collaboration will solve the encryption dilemma "They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety". So goes the quote from Benjamin Franklin, one of the Founding Fathers of the United States, in 1755. Little did he know that over 250 years later, his words would be frequently cited in one of the most complex debates of modern times. In a world where data is collected, shared and sold as the norm, the liberty vs. security question has never been so relevant. The topic has been brought into the public eye by the UK Home Secretary’s draft Investigatory Powers Bill -- or Snoopers’ Charter -- and honed-in on the issue of encryption. More specifically, whether government agencies should be given the power to access encrypted, private communications, by forcing service providers to hand them over. Since many communications providers use end-to-end encryption to protect user privacy and operate with zero knowledge of what is being communicated, the only way for law enforcers to obtain this level of access would be to weaken encryption or change the way users’ private keys are stored. There is no way for the mediator to simply decrypt content; they would have to fundamentally change the way the system works, creating a backdoor of sorts. The revised bill, published this week, comes as Apple’s CEO, Tim Cook, publicly fights a court order to build an encryption backdoor to unlock an iPhone belonging to one of the terrorists in the San Bernadino attacks. To do so, argues Cook, would "be equivalent to a master key, capable of opening hundreds of millions of locks" and would "undermine the very... liberty our government is meant to protect". The Problem with Encryption At the heart of this issue, as Franklin’s quote articulates so well, is the idea that the actions being taken by governments on both sides of the Atlantic come at the expense of our own freedom and progression. On the one hand, encryption makes the communications of potential terrorists more difficult to intercept, but on the other it protects the privacy of every other British and US citizen, safeguarding against data thieves and other malicious activity. Fundamentally, encryption underpins just about every platform for collaboration, connection and communication that exists today. Reforming how it functions could have far-reaching consequences and requires careful management. A Question of Trust It is thanks to encryption that we, as consumers, can shop online or pay monthly bills with the click of a button, assured that our personal details are safe. From a business perspective, encryption enables organizations to work across enterprise boundaries in the cloud, sharing commercially sensitive data or legal documents without gambling on security. The trust that we put into the Internet -- the smartphones and tablets that we carry, and the platforms we communicate through -- is a key driver for economic growth. If the UK is to maintain its global role and influence, protecting business interests against potentially massive economic espionage is essential. If we weaken encryption, we weaken trust in the entire system. An Exodus of Service Providers Yet, the proposals outlined in the draft Snoopers’ Charter in particular seem to ignore this -- the end goal being that ISPs or other organizations providing a service protected by encryption must be able to bypass it. Downgrading algorithms in this way would set a global precedent that technology providers must assist law enforcement in breaking users’ security, which would eventually make private data more vulnerable and visible. This could have the effect of forcing service providers to jurisdictions outside the scope of the Charter in order to be able to provide the type of secure services their customers want and expect. The nature of the Internet accommodates this free movement, to the potential detriment of the British technology sector and wider economy. Taking Back Control With the spotlight firmly on privacy and a rapidly evolving threat landscape, businesses must implement solutions to ensure the confidential and personally identifiable data they control remains secure across all the countries and jurisdictional boundaries they need to operate. The increasingly dynamic and globalized nature of business has brought rise to innovative technology solutions that can enable strong protection and encryption to travel with content wherever it needs to be shared in the course of doing business. With state-of-the art Information Rights Management solutions, content can effectively protect itself. We need trust in these systems to enable global trade and collaboration. Companies and individuals are becoming more aware of the need to protect their information and we see an increase in requests for self-ownership of encryption keys used by service providers regardless of the physical location of the data -- a model known as "Customer Managed Keys" (CMK). We now stand at a crossroads in the encryption debate, and the only way forwards will be through collaboration between governments, global technology companies, and wider business. Decisions taken now could have profound consequences on the future growth of the Internet globally. At the same time, individual jurisdictions are at risk of eroding the critical element of trust in services provided within their domestic markets and simply pushing the most secure services to operate beyond their borders. Let’s hope that as new legislation unfolds, policy makers remember the words of Benjamin Franklin, and deliver solutions that strike the right balance between freedom and security. Richard Anstey, CTO EMEA, Intralinks Published under license from ITProPortal.com, a Net Communities Ltd Publication. All rights reserved. Photo Credit: Cory Thoman / Shutterstock 2016-03-14 08:38 By Richard

Total 85 articles. Created at 2016-03-15 06:00