Category: News

Only 10 percent of cloud apps are secure

Posted on January 9, 2015 by - News

Every silver has a cloudy liningNew research has found that only one in ten cloud apps are secure enough for enterprise use.

According to a report from cloud experts Netskope, organisations are employing an average of over 600 business cloud apps, despite the majority of software posing a high risk of data leak.

More than 15 percent of logins for business cloud apps used by organisations had been breached by hackers.

One in five businesses in the Netskope cloud actively used more than 1,000 cloud apps, and over eight per cent of files in corporate-sanctioned cloud storage apps were in violation of DLP policies, source code, and other policies surrounding confidential and sensitive data.

A quarter of all files are shared with one or more people outside of the organisation, and of external users with links to shared content, almost 12 percent have access to 100 or more files.

Netskope CEO Sanjay Beri said that 2014 left an indelible mark on security – between ongoing high-profile breaches and the onslaught of vulnerabilities like Shellshock and Heartbleed, CSOs and CISOs had more on their plate than ever.

“These events underscore the sobering reality that many in the workforce have been impacted by data breaches and will subsequently use compromised accounts in their work lives, putting sensitive information at risk,” he added.

The research also found that the most insecure apps were primarily linked with marketing, finance and human resource software, while cloud storage, social and IT/app management programmes had the lowest proportion of insecure apps.

“Employees today have shifted from thinking of apps as a nice-to-have to a must-have, and CISOs must continue to adapt to that trend to secure their sensitive corporate and customer data across all cloud apps, including those unsanctioned by IT,” Beri continued.

Google Drive, Facebook, Youtube, Twitter and Gmail were among the apps investigated.

Do you want electricity with that?

Posted on January 9, 2015 by - News

mcdonalds-hospitalPurveyor of meat themed products McDonalds is installing 600 charging hotspots in 50 of its British restaurants.

The move means that anyone with a compatible smartphone or tablet can simply sit it on the counter to start automatically charging its batteries. They will have to be quick of course, it does not take long to eat at McDonalds, something seems to propel you from the building after five minutes.

The setup is part of a deal with wireless charging technology company Air Charge which will provide  the charging pads, which operate on the Qi standard.

Air Charge made the announcement during this week’s International CES in Las Vegas but it has been trailed in some UK McDonald’s already.

The charging plates, which will be integrated into tables and counters, are water resistant and wipe clean and offer native support to 70 different smartphone handsets currently on sale.

Nokia Lumia handsets support the Qi wireless charging standard, either out of the box or via an optional back plate.

Starbucks has been named as rolling out wireless charging points across its US operation. However, rather than the Qi standard, backed by the Wireless Power Consortium, Starbucks has opted for the Power Matters Alliance standard instead.

There were three competing wireless charging standards all attempting to become the global standard, but two of them the Power Matters Alliance (which counts Google as a member) merged with the Alliance for Wireless Power (A4WP), which is backed by Dell and Microsoft to integrate the two standards in future devices and chargers.

Tablet users to exceed one billion

Posted on January 8, 2015 by - News

tesco-hudl-tabletA report claimed that over a billion people in the world will use a tablet this year – that’s 15 percent of the world’s population.
eMarketer said that by 2018, 1.43 billion worldwide will use tablets but that doesn’t mean that sales of tablets will increase exponentially.
While the number of tablet users will increase by just over 17 percent in 2015, eMarketer says that growth was 53.1 percent in 2013 and 29.1 percent in  2014.
In 2018 the growth figure will be just under eight percent, and there are a few reasons for that, the study suggests.
One is that tablets are seen as luxury items, and they are facing competition from ever larger smartphones and other devices.  The last reason eMarketer gives is that the use of tablets is not always that clear.
By 2018, Chinese tablets will be used by around 435.5 million people, USA people will account for 172.6 million, India for 60.2 million people and the UK for 38.4 million people.
The survey predicts that Indonesia will enter the top five in 2016, and by 2018 nearly a fifth of the world’s population will be tablet users.

 

Apple hikes prices in Europe

Posted on January 8, 2015 by - News

blue-applePrices in Apple’s App Store within the European Union are set to rise in the next day or so.
According to AppleInsider, which has seen an email sent by the company to its developers, the email said prices in the App Store are to rise “for all territories in the European Union”.
Other countries are also set to see price changes, with Canada and Norway facing rises, while Iceland prices are set to fall.
Changes may affect Russia too, but they’re less clear because of the fluctuations of the price of the ruble against other currencies.
Apple said the changes were being made as a result of “adjustments” in the EU and changes in foreign exchange rates.
AppleInsider said the changes are probably because the Euro weakened against the US dollar during the course of this week.

 

Scientists improve quantum hard drive

Posted on January 8, 2015 by - News

crystalThe Australian National University (ANU) claimed that a prototype quantum hard drive it’s developing has improved storage times by as much as 100 times.
The goal of the scientists are to use quantum physics to develop a highly secure data encryption network using quantum information, with applications in banking and other internet functions.
As we reported earlier this week, other scientists are working to achieve higher internet security using quantum physics.
The scientists said they stored quantum information in atoms of Europium embedded in a crystal.
They claim that the solid state technique offers advantages over using laser beams in optical fibres.  The team’s record storage time is now six hours.
Manjin Zhong from ANU, said: “Our storage times are now so long that it means people need to rethink what is the best way to distribute quantum data.  Even transporting our crystals at pedestrian speeds we have less loss than laser systems for a given distance.”
She said that the team’s goal is store light in separate crystals and transport them to different parts of networks thousands of kilometres apart.  “We are thinking of our crystals as portable optical hard drives for quantum entanglement,” she said.

Euro semi sales show growth

Posted on January 8, 2015 by - News

nand-chipsThe European Semiconductor Industry Association (EISA) released data for November 2014 which showed sales were up by 3.4 percent compared to the same month a year before.
EISA said combined sales between January to November showed a growth of eight percent compared to 13 percent.
The trade organisation said that these figures showed healthy demand for chips in Europe, with the figures representing a three month rolling average.
The value of sales in Europe rose to $3.183 billion, contrasting with worldwide sales in November of $29.670 billion.
Sales were driven by optoelectronics used in part cards, MOS microprocessors and memory devices.
But exchange rate differences between the US dollar and the Euro continued to affect sales during November, EISA said.

 

Google’s search share falls

Posted on January 8, 2015 by - News

330ogleA report said that Google lost US search share in December while Yahoo gained share for the first time in a long time.
The report, from Statcounter, said that in December Google managed to grab 75.2 percent of US searches, with Microsoft’s Bing coming in second at 12.5 percent and Yahoo third with 10.4 percent.
Google had been the default search engine for people using the popular Firefox browser until last month, when Firefox instead struck a deal with Yahoo.
Firefox is not the most popular browser and held  12 percent of internet usage in December 2014.
Statcounter compiles its figures by surveying 15 billion page views a month to ver three million sites.  It does not record figures for Western Europe.

 

Github too open saucy for porn companies

Posted on January 8, 2015 by - News

INDUSTRY HP 1Open Sauce depository Github is being hit in a crossfire between porn companies and torrent sites.

Several Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) complaints filed to Google by the porn companies have taken down dozens of legitimate GitHub URLs.

GitHub support pages, entire code repositories, and user profile pages have all been purged from Google and Tomasz Janczuk, a former Microsoft employee, had part of his GitHub repository ​removed from Google’s search results by a company representing Adam & Eve, a porn production company.

Janczuk said that removing GitHub pages from Google’s search results could harm the open source software community by reducing its visibility online.

Apparently Adam&Eve thought that Janczuk’s URL, “https://github.com/tja​nczuk/edge,” was apparently too close to The E​dge, a 2001 flick made by the company.

Of course it is not just the porn companies doing this. Other GitHub pages have been taken down by the music companies for similar reasons.

All of it is because the content groups are using the dumbest method to find P2P content – that of URLs rather than actually checking if the site infringes their copyright.

GitHub does have a DMCA ​policy​ requires that users be notified of complaints levied against them and given time to correct the issue. Google handles its 345 million yearly takedowns nearly automatically .

Nicky Case, developer of Nothing​ to Hide, an open source indie game was target​ted by Total Wipes in September for having the word “hide” in its GitHub​ URL, in an email. In the end however his software was not taken down from Google’s search results.

But he said that if his GitHub repository was less famous, maybe it wouldn’t have gone as well.

 

Samsung profits slump

Posted on January 8, 2015 by - News

samsung-hqSamsung confirmed its first annual profit decline since 2011, but said that a fourth quarter pick up indicated that earnings may have stabilised.

The smartphone maker lost market share for three consecutive quarters up to July-September, and analysts say the trend likely continued in the October-December period.

The Tame Apple press claims it is because Samsung cannot beat the super bendy iPhone 6, but it is more likely that Samsung has seen its Chinese market disappear to locally made brands. It has also suffered from a weak won, which explains its limp.

Healthy memory chip demand and improvements in the mobile business on the back of new mid-to-low tier smartphones are buoying hopes that Samsung has at last staunched the bleeding.

Samsung said its fourth-quarter operating profit is likely to be $4.74 billion, beating what the cocaine nose jobs of Wall Street had predicted.

The outlook means Samsung’s 2014 profit will probably be the weakest in three years, although it marks a rebound from the third-quarter’s profit which was the firm’s lowest quarterly result in more than three years. The company is expected to release its annual results later this month.

Most analysts expect profits to continue improving through at least the second quarter of 2015 with the outfit’s semiconductor division to do much better than the mobile business in October-December.

The company did not provide a breakdown of its earnings figures in Thursday’s outlook, but a person with direct knowledge of the matter said that components sales picked up across the board, with healthy demand for memory chips and higher liquid crystal display panel prices.

The mobile division’s contribution to Samsung’s profit has slipped from about 68 percent at its peak in 2013 to about 44 percent in the third quarter.

 

TalkTalk buys Tesco’s Blinkbox

Posted on January 8, 2015 by - News

tesco-blinkboxTalkTalk confirmed  that it has written a cheque for Tesco’s Blinkbox Movies business and in a three for two deal bought the supermarket giants budget fixed line broadband and phone customers.

Tesco has been suffering from a pile of financial hurt and has been looking to offload some of its  less lucrative assets. Web-based Blinkbox video streaming service was given a kicking from better offerings from Netflix, Amazon and NOW TV.

Tesco originally took ownership of Blinkbox for £3m in 2011. Since then the supermarket giant has added Blinkbox Books through the £4.5m acquisition of digital book service Modcast and they later paid £10.8m to buy music streaming service WE7, which was turned into Blinkbox Music.

But the service has not made enough cash and last we heard made a post-tax loss of £24.7m on total revenues of just £3.5m.

Vodafone and TalkTalk were known to have an expressed an in the service.

TalkTalk said that the integration of blinkbox with its YouView based TV business would “begin immediately” through a restructuring of the combined platform.

Adrian Letts, Blinkbox CEO and Co-Founder, will join TalkTalk as Managing Director for TV and report to Tristia Harrison, Managing Director of the ISPs consumer business.

Buying Tesco’s broadband base is another example of TalkTalk trying to make  its national network to grow faster.

Apparently Tesco’s broadband customers, which were still using Vodafone’s LLU telecoms network, will be transferred across to the TalkTalk platform  by September 2015.

Lenovo praises Windows 10

Posted on January 8, 2015 by - News


windows-10-technical-preview-turquoiseMicrosoft’s forthcoming OS Windows 10 has been praised to the skies by thinkpad maker Lenovo.

Lenovo Peter Hortensius, chief technology officer at Lenovo told PC World that customers are anxious to breathe some life into Windows 10 and his outfit was bullish and hopeful about Windows 10.

Windows 10 will succeed Windows 8.1 operating system, which has been slammed for its touch-based tablet user interface. Windows 10 will resolve many problems affecting Windows 8.1, which is a good OS but has its problems, Hortensius said.

Windows 10 will boot straight to the desktop and brings back many familiar Windows 7 features, which Microsoft  hopes will please OS loyalists. It also removes program incompatibility issues plaguing Windows Phone and Windows 8 versions for Intel and ARM processors.

Analysts have said Windows 10 could spur a round of PC upgrades in businesses, which could boost PC shipments. Lenovo’s shipments have increased even as rivals like Dell and Hewlett-Packard struggled in recent years as laptop and desktop shipments slowed.

Customers are responding well to changes in Windows 10, and Microsoft is taking the right approach in developing the OS, Hortensius said.

Lenovo was positive about where the product was going and depending on customer demand, Lenovo may consider the OS for a range PCs, tablets and handsets.

“It’s up to Microsoft to make competitive offerings. If they do… we’ll gladly use it,” Hortensius said.

Apple to make bending a feature

Posted on January 8, 2015 by - News

bendAfter it released its iPhone 6 which bent in your pocket, the more cynical amongst us thought that Apple might try to make this a “feature”.

Sure enough Apple has won a patent for flexible display tech that allows for layering of components like microphones or speakers

Flexible displays, in and of themselves, are nothing new. What makes this patent different is that it includes support for components — like buttons, microphones, or speakers — that can be mounted around the display and work through it.

So in other words when the phone bends everything else bends with it – exactly the effect when you put a bad structurally designed phone in your skinny jeans and the whole thing bends.

What appears to have happened is that Apple did not just make its bending on its iPhones a feature, it actually took out a patent on it.

According to Patently Apple this flexible display is capable of being bent and acting as a pass-through device that can handle a wide range of functionalities.

Apple envisions people bending or in some way manipulating the screen to touch a button activator below its surface.

By deforming that specific portion of the display, the activity associated with the button would be created. In another example, the flexibility of the display would create a porous layer that would allow for sound waves to pass through. Therefore, speakers and microphones and other components could sit under a screen and work as they do now.

Actually, it does appear that using this technology Apple could build a phone which is all-screen or nearly all-screen in design which will mean the death of the home button.

Crooks stole 61 million customer records

Posted on January 7, 2015 by - News

IBM logoResearch from IBM said that in 2014 cyber attackers stole 61 million records from retailers.
But that’s just in the USA.
IBM’s survey said that there had been a 50 percent decline in attacks on retail web sites in 2014.
The report said that even though the number of cyber attacks had fallen, the attacks have become much more sophisticated.
IBM’s security services analyse over 20 billion security incidents every day – presumably worldwide.
The attackers are developing sophisticated techniques to grab “massive amounts” of data with each attack.
“The threat from organised cyber crime rings remains the largest security challenge for retailers,” said Kris Lovejoy, general manager of IBM Security Services.
IBM suggested that not all cyber breaches are disclosed.
Big Blue said the primary way cyber gangs gained access was through a method called Secure Shell Brute Force, which now outweighs malicious code.
There has been a rise in attacks however in point of sale systems using malware, but most were through command injection or SQL injection.
IBM said lack of data validation in SQL databases by system administrators made retail databases a favourite spot to attack.

 

Apple iWatch to arrive in March

Posted on January 7, 2015 by - News

two-applesA report said that Apple will start selling its much hyped iWatch in March.
That’s according to 9to5mac, which said the wearable gizmo will first be trialled in Apple stores in the USA – with training for staff slated for mid February.
The site said that Apple has been improving battery life on the product and intensively testing it.
But sources in Taiwan late last year said that there had been delays in producing the device as quickly as people would have liked.
And 9to5mac said that there could still be delays in developing software and in manufacturing the rather expensive machine.
The iWatch is set to be released in three versions, with the standard metal and glass model costing around $350.
No one is entirely sure whether the wearable market will ever take off.  Many young people don’t bother with watches in the West anymore, relying on their smartphone to tell them the time.

 

Quantum theory may help net security

Posted on January 7, 2015 by - News

National-Security-Agency--008Scientists at the Griffith University in Queensland claim quantum physics will help protect data on the internet.
The researchers said that so-called “quantum steering” can be used to improve data security over long distances.
Project leader Professor Geoff Pryde boasts that the method his team are engineering promises “absolutely secure information transfer”.
He said: “Your credit card details or other personal data sent over the internet could be completely isolated from hackers.”
The scientists used special photon quantum states to program a measurement device at each step of sending code.
He said that quantum systems would secure long distance comms by generating random and uncrackable code.
But that would rely on both parties sharing systems.  But his team has invented something called quantum steering, which is used to maintain communication security and removing trust in third party devices.