Новости за 08.09.2015

Released a little over a month ago, Microsoft's new Edge browser has gotten its first set of critical security patches.

Microsoft is headed back to court this week in its longstanding effort to fight a U.S. Department of Justice search warrant seeking access to a crime suspect’s digital documents stored on a server in Ireland.

A petition urging the White House to act urgently on a court ruling that may force thousands of recent STEM graduates to leave the U.S. early next year reached 100,000 signatures Tuesday, the threshold for an official government response.

The next major release of Dynamics CRM will arrive in the fourth quarter of this year, Microsoft announced Tuesday, and one of its key unifying themes will be helping sales teams stay focused on the task at hand.

A group of hackers that target military and government organizations has recently borrowed code from an old online banking Trojan called Carberp, further blurring the line between cybercrime and cyberespionage.

Back in May, Google announced that it would be offering its Compute Engine VMs in a new flavor. Called preemptible VMs (presumably as opposed to contemptible VMs which would be far less desirable), these compute instances are priced at rock bottom — at a 70% discount to regular instances.

Recent data from an Irish metrics firm shows that the free upgrade to Windows 10 initially kick-started usage of the new operating system, but that within a month of its July 29 release, gains fell below the threshold set by Windows 7 six years ago.

Everyone loves a bargain, even in the IT industry.

Following a beta period launched in May, Google has made its low-cost "preemptible" virtual machines available as a full commercial offering.

The Google Compute Engine Preemptible Virtual Machines can cost 70% less than regular VMs on the Google Cloud Platform, with the stipulation that Google can shut down these lower-cost machines at any time.

Google offers these VMs using the leftover capacity within their data centers. Читать дальше...

Fujitsu has developed a wireless communications receiver that can transfer data at a rate of around 20 gigabits per second while being small enough to fit in a smartphone. 

Each time a revolutionary piece of technology disrupts an industry, it is met with both resistance and excitement. For those technologies that inevitably reach massive consumer adoption, there are a number of winners and losers. Take the Internet, for example. We’ve already seen it dramatically change several industries with success and loss stories along the way -- Netflix vs. Blockbuster, record labels vs. Apple (and now Spotify), encyclopedias vs. Wikipedia.  

Laughs

Apple has taught Siri a few new useless hints just in time to whet people's appetite for its big reveal at 10 a.m. PT (1 p.m. ET) on Wednesday, when Apple execs will take the stage in San Francisco to tell us all about the company's new products.

Meanwhile you can ask Siri: “Hey Siri, give us a hint.”

Previously Siri said things like “Look deep within yourself and you will find the answer." This morning, Apple appears to have given it several more responses, which I've... Читать дальше...

Android and Twitter have long had a rocky relationship. The official Android Twitter app has always left something to be desired -- and at the same time, Twitter has made it increasingly difficult for third-party developers to create sustainable alternatives.

AT&T has announced its first plug-in vehicle Wi-Fi hotspot, the ZTE Mobley, which will go on sale this Friday for $100 will no annual service commitment.

As Microsoft's virtual assistant Cortana introduces herself to new Windows 10 users around the world, Chinese search giant Baidu is adding its own AI-based assistant, Duer, to a mobile app used by millions of Chinese.

It’s not every day that a person would come home from their university class and say, “Today I wirelessly hacked a pacemaker and killed the patient. Tomorrow I’ll hack an insulin pump and kill a patient.” Yet a few select souls from the University of South Alabama (USA) can shout that from a rooftop and still don’t need to worry about going to prison because the wireless medical devices were in iStan; it’s the “most advanced wireless patient simulator on the market.”

I've been a regular commentator on Capriza, a young company that's taking on a big challenge. Founded only a few short years ago, Capriza has decided to solve one of the biggest problems today, that of mobilizing traditional enterprise applications. This is no small challenge; traditional legacy enterprise applications from vendors like SAP and Oracle are generally considered big, heavy, slow, difficult to use and tied to desktop platforms — hardly a good base to build a mobile app strategy from. Читать дальше...

Ross Piper has his work cut out for him.

Hired by Dropbox in 2013 to help it attract business customers, the former Salesforce executive will now play a key role in the company's efforts to live up to its recent $10 billion valuation -- the subject of much industry skepticism.

"Enterprises are critical for us," said Piper, Dropbox's vice president of enterprise, in an interview. "They're the ones that help drive best practices."

Convincing the enterprise audience, however, is no easy feat. Читать дальше...

Microsoft has acquired security company Adallom in a bid to give IT departments more control over application access and data stored across cloud services.

I am currently working with a tier 1 PCI company, assisting it with various compliance tasks. As part of the project, I am simultaneously preparing it for its annual PCI audit, responding to audits by other organizations for which the company is a key third party, and reviewing organizations that are its key third parties. It seems that with the focus on PCI compliance these days, everyone is auditing everyone else. Despite this, we don't seem to be reducing the number of credit card breaches, or actually making organizations more secure. Читать дальше...

If you're a company that makes its own websites and applications, make sure your developers don't do what the Ashley Madison coders did: store sensitive credentials like database passwords, API secrets, authentication tokens or SSL private keys in source code repositories.

AI the Apple way

Reuters has confirmed previous analysis suggesting Apple is developing artificial intelligence to make its products more useful while maintaining user privacy.

From Reuters: “Apple has ramped up its hiring of artificial intelligence experts, recruiting from PhD programs, posting dozens of job listings and greatly increasing the size of its AI staff, a review of hiring sites suggests and numerous sources confirm.”

In latter paragraphs the report describes Apple... Читать дальше...

Apple will unveil a larger iPad on Wednesday at its annual iPhone event, analysts bet, as a way for the Cupertino, Calif. company to boost tablet sales by targeting creative professionals, mobile office workers and perhaps field forces with more screen real estate.

LinkedIn was once notorious for flooding yourinbox with everything from job alerts to news digests. The good news: The social network has cut back how often it sends you messages.

New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman took a curtain call on Aug. 26, saying that his office successfully pressured several chains including Gap, Victoria's Secret and Abercrombie & Fitch, to abandon on-call shifts — chain-wide, and not just in New York state. The AG is still pushing several other chains — including Target, JCPenney and TJX (which owns T.J. Maxx, Marshalls, HomeGoods, Sierra Trading Post, Winners and other chains) — to also back off.

Boobies: That's what naïve app users were hoping for. Instead, they got demands for $500 ransoms plastered across their Android screens. The perp is the Adult Player app.