Twitter To Track Mobile Users

Twitter Inc has plans to start tracking what third-party apps are installed on users’ mobile devices so the social media company can deliver more tailored content, including ads, the company has revealed.

The feature, called “app graph,” will allow the company to see what other applications users may have installed on phones or other devices.

“To help build a more personal Twitter experience for you, we are collecting and occasionally updating the list of apps installed on your mobile device so we can deliver tailored content that you might be interested in,” the company said on its site.

The posting also included instructions on how to turn the feature off. Twitter is not collecting data from within the applications, the posting noted.

Twitter, whose main service allows users to broadcast 140-character messages, has been searching for ways to re-invigorate user engagement and drive growth. As part of that effort, the company is considering creating additional mobile applications beyond its core messaging service.

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McAfee’s Biometric Software Coming Soon

A McAfee security product that will use biometric technology to authenticate users will be available for download by the end of the year, said Kirk Skaugen, senior vice president and general manager of the PC Client Group at Intel, last week.

“Your biometrics basically eliminate the need for you to enter passwords for Windows log in and eventually all your websites ever again,” Skaugen said.

Further product details were not immediately available. But one of the major inconveniences in using PCs and tablets is remembering passwords, which biometrics can tame.

An average user has about 18 passwords and biometric authentication will make PCs easier to use, Skaugen said.

Biometric authentication isn’t new. It’s being used in Apple Pay, where fingerprint authentication helps authorize credit card payments through the iPhone or iPad. Intel has been working on multiple forms of biometric authentication through fingerprint, gesture, face and voice recognition.

McAfee is owned by Intel, and the chip maker is building smartphone, tablet and PC technology that takes advantage of the security software. Intel has also worked on biometric technology for wearable devices like SMS Audio’s BioSport In-Ear Headphones, which can measure a person’s heart rate.

Intel also wants to make PCs and tablets easier to use through wireless charging, display, docking and data transfers. Such capabilities would eliminate the need to carry power brick and cables for displays and data transfers. Such capabilities will start appearing in laptops next year with sixth-generation Core chips code-named Skylake, which will be released in the second half.

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Silk Road 2.0 Shutdown

U.S. governmnent authorities said they have shut down the successor website to Silk Road, an underground online drug marketplace, and charged its alleged operator with conspiracy to commit drug trafficking, computer hacking, money laundering and other crimes.

Blake Benthall, 26, was arrested last Wednesday in San Francisco and was expected to make an initial court appearance in federal court there later on Thursday.

The charges against Benthall carry a maximum sentence of life in prison.

A lawyer for Benthall could not immediately be identified.

Silk Road 2.0 was launched late last year, weeks after authorities had shuttered the original Silk Road website in October and arrested its alleged owner, Ross Ulbricht, who went by the online alias, Dread Pirate Roberts.

“Let’s be clear – this Silk Road, in whatever form, is the road to prison,” Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara, whose office is prosecuting both cases, said in a statement.

Benthall, known as “Defcon” online, became the operator of Silk Road 2.0 in December, one month after an unnamed co-conspirator launched the site, according to prosecutors.

Silk Road 2.0 provided an online bazaar where users across the world could buy and sell drugs, computer hacking tools and other illicit items, using the digital currency Bitcoin as payment, authorities said.

As of September, the site was generating at least $8 million a month in sales, they said.

The government’s investigation included an undercover agent who was able to infiltrate the administrative staff of the website and interact directly with Benthall, prosecutors said.

Ulbricht, 30, has pleaded not guilty and is scheduled for trial in New York in January.

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Will Facebook Enter The Healthcare Arena?

Facebook Inc already can tell who your friends are and the what types of things grabs your attention. Soon, it could also know the state of your health.

On the heels of fellow Silicon Valley technology companies Apple Inc and Google Inc, Facebook is plotting its first steps into the fertile field of healthcare, said three people familiar with the matter. The people requested anonymity as the plans are still in development.

The company is exploring creating online “support communities” that would connect Facebook users suffering from various ailments. A small team is also considering new “preventative care” applications that would help people improve their lifestyles.

In recent months, the sources said, the social networking giant has been holding meetings with medical industry experts and entrepreneurs, and is setting up a research and development unit to test new health apps. Facebook is still in the idea-gathering stage, the people said.

Healthcare has historically been an area of interest for Facebook, but it has taken a backseat to more pressing products.

Recently, Facebook executives have come to realize that healthcare might work as a tool to increase engagement with the site.

One catalyst: the unexpected success of Facebook’s “organ-donor status initiative,” introduced in 2012. The day that Facebook altered profile pages to allow members to specify their organ donor-status, 13,054 people registered to be organ donors online in the United States, a 21 fold increase over the daily average of 616 registrations, according to a June 2013 study published in the American Journal of Transplantation.

Separately, Facebook product teams noticed that people with chronic ailments such as diabetes would search the social networking site for advice, said one former Facebook insider. In addition, the proliferation of patient networks such as PatientsLikeMe demonstrate that people are increasingly comfortable sharing symptoms and treatment experiences online.

Chief executive Mark Zuckerberg may step up his personal involvement in health. Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan, a pediatric resident at University of California San Francisco, recently donated $5 million to the Ravenswood Health Center in East Palo Alto.

Any advertising built around the health initiatives would not be as targeted as it could be on television or other media. Pharmaceutical companies, for instance, are prohibited from using Facebook to promote the sale of prescription drugs, in part because of concerns surrounding disclosures.

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UPS Breached

Credit and debit card information belonging to customers made purchases at 51 UPS Store Inc. locations in 24 states this year may have been illegally accessed as the result of an intrusion into the company’s networks.

In a statement on Wednesday, UPS said it was recently notified by law enforcement officials about a “broad-based malware intrusion” of its systems.

A subsequent investigation by an IT security firm showed that attackers had installed previously unknown malware on systems in more than four-dozen stores to gain access to cardholder data. The affected stores represent about 1% of the 4,470 UPS Store locations around the country.

The intrusion may have exposed data on transactions conducted at the stores between Jan. 20 and Aug. 11, 2014. “For most locations, the period of exposure to this malware began after March 26, 2014,” UPS said in a statement.

In addition to payment card information, the hackers also appear to have gained access to customer names, as well as postal and email addresses.

Each of the affected locations is individually owned and runs private networks that are not connected to other stores, UPS added. The company provided alist of affected locations.

The breach is the third significant one to be disclosed in the past week. Last Thursday, grocery store chain Supervalu announced it had suffered a malicious intrusion that exposed account data belonging to customers who had shopped at about 180 of the company’s stores in about a dozen states. The breach also affected customers from several other major grocery store chains for which Supervalu provides IT services.

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Opera Mini Goes To Windows Phone

Norwegian software maker Opera inked a deal to take over the browser building unit of Microsoft’s Nokia cellular phone unit and reported second-quarter earnings above expectations on Thursday, sending it shares sharply higher.

“We have signed a strategic licensing deal with Microsoft. We are basically taking over the browser building department in Nokia,” Opera Chief Executive Lars Boilsesen said. “This means that Opera Mini will become the default browser for Microsoft’s feature phone product lines and the Asha phones product lines.”

The deal will be profitable from the start, he added.

“All the current user base will be encouraged to upgrade to Opera Mini and all the new phones will come with Opera Mini pre-installed as a default browser. This is a great deal for us. We have dreamed of this for more than 10 years.”

In a separate statement, Opera said the licensing agreement applies to mobile phones based on the Series 30+, Series 40 and Asha software platforms.

“As part of the agreement, people who use the current browser for these phones, Xpress, will be encouraged to upgrade to the latest Opera Mini browser. Factory-new devices will have Opera Mini pre-installed.”

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Amazon Goes 3D

Amazon.com Inc will offer 3D printing services that allow customers to customize and build earrings, bobble head toys and other items from third-party vendors using a new personalization option on its website.

Most of the more than 200 items available on the company’s new 3D printed products store, which was rolled out on Monday, can be customized using a new feature that allows users to rotate and change the item they are viewing.

Before it is printed by one of Amazon’s sellers, users can customize a product like as a bobble head figure by changing its skin and eye color, hair style and outfit, Amazon said.

“The customization is something we’re keenly interested in,” said Petra Schindler-Carter, director for Amazon marketplace sales, speaking in an interview. “We’ll always look for new applications for that.”

Amazon, which has more than 240 million users, has expanded its marketplaces division to include new areas such as fine art and wine. It is part of Amazon’s larger investment into new areas like mobile services and original content that led to its larger-than-expected second-quarter loss last week.

The new printing option taps into a broader “Maker movement” among tech entrepreneurs in northern California, and to some extent Europe, that is focused on customizing 3D objects rather than development software or mobile applications.

3D printers have gained in popularity on Amazon Supply, a wholesale site for businesses. That interest led Amazon to offer customers an 3D print option, Schindler-Carter said.

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Oracle Takes A Fall

Oracle posted fiscal fourth-quarter results that were just horrible for investors looking for more progress in web-based services, sending its shares lower.

The company had been expected to report a pickup in its software business and progress in cloud computing, shares of Oracle had gained 10 percent over the past three months. However yesterday it was clear that Oracle is getting a kicking from the competition like Salesforce.com and Workday which have been offering competitive software and Internet-based products at prices that often undercut Oracle.

Tech spending is likely to fall as more companies move to the cloud. Oracle has been rolling out its own cloud-based products but they remain under five percent of its overall revenue. For the fiscal first quarter, Oracle expects software and cloud revenue to grow between 6 percent and 8 percent. That forecast includes expectations for software- and platform-related cloud services to grow between 25 percent and 35 percent.

Oracle said it expects its hardware system revenue to be in a range of down 1 percent to up 3 percent.

For its latest fourth quarter, Oracle said overall revenue rose 3 percent to $11.3 billion. That was less than the $11.48 billion analysts had expected on average. Net income fell 4 percent to $3.6 billion.

Revenue from Oracle’s hardware systems products grew 2 percent to $870 million.

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Lavaboom Offers To Encrypt

A new webmail service named Lavaboom promises to provide easy-to-use email encryption without ever learning its users’ private encryption keys or message contents.

Lavaboom, based in Germany and founded by Felix MA1/4ller-Irion, is named after Lavabit, the now defunct encrypted email provider believed to have been used by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. Lavabit decided to shut down its operations in August in response to a U.S. government request for its SSL private key that would have allowed the government to decrypt all user emails.

Lavaboom designed its system for end-to-end encryption, meaning that only users will be in possession of the secret keys needed to decrypt the messages they receive from others. The service will only act as a carrier for already encrypted emails.

Lavaboom calls this feature “zero-knowledge privacy” and implemented it in a way that allows emails to be encrypted and decrypted locally using JavaScript code inside users’ browsers instead of its own servers.

The goal of this implementation is to protect against upstream interception of email traffic as it travels over the Internet and to prevent Lavaboom to produce plain text emails or encryption keys if the government requests them. While this would protect against some passive data collection efforts by intelligence agencies like the NSA, it probably won’t protect against other attack techniques and exploits that such agencies have at their disposal to obtain data from computers and browsers after it was decrypted.

Security researchers have yet to weigh in on the strength of Lavaboom’s implementation. The service said on its website that it considers making parts of the code open source and that it has a small budget for security audits if any researchers are interested.

Those interested in trying out the service can request to be included in its beta testing period, scheduled to start in about two weeks.

Free Lavaboom accounts will come with 250MB of storage space and will use two-way authentication based on the public-private keypair and a password. A premium subscription will cost a!8 (around US$11) per month and will provide users with 1GB of storage space and a three-factor authentication option.

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Microsoft Updates Office Online

Microsoft is updating its Web-based Office Online suite, closing the features gap with the main Office 365 and Office 2013 suites installed on users’ devices.

“We know you want features that allow you to move as seamlessly as possible between Office Online and the desktop,” wrote Kaberi Chowdhury, an Office Online technical product manager, in a blog post Monday.

Improvements to Excel Online include the ability to insert new comments, edit and delete existing comments, and properly open and edit spreadsheets that contain Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) code.

Meanwhile, Word Online has a new “pane” where users can see all comments in a document, and reply to them or mark them as completed. It also has a refined lists feature that is better able to recognize whether users are continuing a list or starting one. In addition, footnotes and end notes can now be added more conveniently inline.

PowerPoint Online has a revamped text editor that offers a layout view that more closely resembles the look of finished slides, according to Microsoft. It also has improved performance and video functionality, including the ability to play back embedded YouTube videos.

For users of OneNote Online, Microsoft is now adding the ability to print out the notes they’ve created with the application.

Microsoft is also making Word Online, PowerPoint Online and OneNote Online available via Google’s Chrome Web Store so that Chrome browser users can add them to their Chrome App launcher. Excel Online will be added later.

The improvements in Office Online will be rolled out to users this week, starting Monday.

Office Online, which used to be called Office Web Apps, competes directly against Google Docs and other browser-based office productivity suites. It’s meant to offer users a free, lightweight, Web-based version of these four applications if they don’t have the desktop editions on the device they’re using at that moment.

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