Sign up for our Technology Newsletter 
Is Iridium A Friend Of Cellular Phones?
June 13, 2012 by admin
Filed under Smartphones
Comments Off on Is Iridium A Friend Of Cellular Phones?
Cellular phones squashed Iridium once, but in its second coming the satellite phone maker and owner of the biggest satellite fleet is relying on them to resurrect their business.
For all their seeming ubiquity, cellular services cover only about 8 percent of the globe, leaving large regions where the only way to communicate is to use a satphone made by Iridium Communications Inc or one of its smaller competitors.
“The need for communication devices and services where terrestrial can’t be there is rising, and as bandwidth needs increase it’s surely helping Iridium,” Macquarie Research analyst Amy Yong said.
Investors have taken notice, pushing up the stock of the company nearly 50 percent over the past eight months.
“It’s a different company, with a prudent and successful financial model,” Raymond James analyst Chris Quilty said.
“They’re growing, they have extraordinarily high barriers to entry and some of the end markets and applications they’re targeting are vast and untapped,” he said.
Unlike its competitors, Iridium’s satellite constellation covers the entire globe, including the poles, and its array of 66 satellites dwarfs the fleets of its rivals. Inmarsat Plc has 11; GlobalStar has eight and is aiming to have 32 in orbit by the year-end; Thuraya has three, with one planned.
1 In 5 U.S. PCs Have No Antivirus Protection
Comments Off on 1 In 5 U.S. PCs Have No Antivirus Protection
Nearly a fifth of Windows PCs in the U.S. lack any active security protection, an antivirus vendor stated on Wednesday, citing numbers from a year-long project.
“The scale of this is unprecedented,” argued Gary Davis, the director of global consumer product marketing for McAfee, talking about the scope of his company’s sampling of PC security.
McAfee took measurements from scans of more than 280 million PCs over the last 12 months, and found that 19.3% of all U.S. Windows computers browsed the Web sans security software. Owners of those systems downloaded and used McAfee’s free Security Scan Plus, a tool that checks for antivirus programs and enabled firewalls.
Globally, the average rate was 17%, putting the U.S. in the top 5 most-unprotected countries of the 24 represented in the scans.
Of the unprotected PCs in the U.S., 63% had no security software at all, while the remaining 37% had an AV program that was no longer active. The latter were likely trial versions of commercial antivirus software that had expired.
Antivirus trials are a fact of life in the Windows world. Most new machines come with security software that runs for a limited time. Some new Dell PCs, for example, come with a 30-day trial of McAfee’s Security Center program.
T-Mobile To Make More Cuts
May 25, 2012 by admin
Filed under Smartphones
Comments Off on T-Mobile To Make More Cuts
T-Mobile USA will eliminate an additional 900 jobs in a restructuring, on top of a 1,900-job reduction at its call centers that was announced in March, the carrier confirmed on Wednesday.
T-Mobile, now with about 36,000 employees, has faced more than two years of subscriber losses. Last year, the wireless carrier lost out on a $39 billion deal to be taken over by AT&T — federal regulators rejected the deal.
In its first quarter results announced May 9, T-Mobile said it lost 510,000 contract customers. It now serves 33.4 million customers.
Not having the iPhone 4S to sell, compared to the other three major U.S. carriers, also hurt T-Mobile and lead to more contract deactivations, the company said in its first-quarter results.
A T-Mobile spokeswoman said in an email that the elimination of 900 jobs was the result of a “restructuring of key functions and departments across the company, including the elimination of some positions and outsourcing of others.”
Twitter Wants To Email You
May 23, 2012 by admin
Filed under Around The Net
Comments Off on Twitter Wants To Email You
Twitter will begin delivering a weekly email digest to highlight for users of the micro-blogging site the tweets they are most likely to be interested in, the company stated on Monday.
The feature marks a departure for a social network that typically emphasizes real-time delivery of information.
How will Twitter determine which tweets a user may want to see? Twitter spokesman Robert Weeks said the digest will feature the tweets that the “people you’re connected to on Twitter are engaging with the most.”
From the email digest, users will be able to see the conversation about a particular tweet, follow shared links and send out their own tweets. The digest will include tweets not just from a user’s own feed but also from the feeds of people he or she follows.
Privacy Advocates & Lawmakers Push For Google Probe
Comments Off on Privacy Advocates & Lawmakers Push For Google Probe
Privacy groups and lawmakers are pushing for a new and more expansive investigation into Google and its privacy practices after the U.S. Federal Communications Commission announced that it found no evidence that the company violated eavesdropping laws.
Late last week, the FCC reported that there was no legal precedent to find fault with Google collecting unprotected home Wi-Fi data, such as personal email, passwords and search histories, with its roaming Street View cars between 2007 and 2010.
However, the FCC did fine Google $25,000 for obstructing its investigation.
A Google spokesperson took issue with the fine.
“We disagree with the FCC’s characterization of our cooperation in their investigation and will be filing a response,” said the spokesperson in an email to Computerworld. “It was a mistake for us to include code in our software that collected payload data, but we believe we did nothing illegal. We have worked with the relevant authorities to answer their questions and concerns.”
The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), a national privacy watchdog, disagreed with the FCC findings.
In a letter sent to U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder today, EPIC asked that the Department of Justice investigate Google’s surreptitious collecting of Wi-Fi data from residential networks.
“Given the inadequacy of the FCC’s investigation and the law enforcement responsibilities of the attorney general, EPIC urges the Department of Justice to investigate Google’s collection of Wi-Fi data from residential Wi-Fi networks,” wrote Mark Rotenberg, executive director of the advocacy group.
“By the [FCC’s] own admission, the investigation conducted was inadequate and did not address the applicability of federal wiretap law to Google’s interception of emails, usernames, passwords, browsing histories and other personal information,” Rotenberg added.
Microsoft Seizes Botnet Servers
Microsoft Corp scored a win in efforts to fight online banking fraud, saying it had seized several servers used to steal login names and passwords, disrupting some of the world’s most sophisticated cybercrime rings.
The software giant said on Monday that its cybercrime investigation group also took legal and technical actions to fight notorious criminals who infect computers with a prevalent malicious software known as Zeus.
By recruiting computers into networks called botnets, Zeus logs the online activity of infected machines, providing criminals with credentials to access financial accounts.
“We’ve disrupted a critical source of money-making for digital fraudsters and cyber thieves, while gaining important information to help identify those responsible and better protect victims,” said Richard Boscovich, senior attorney for the Microsoft Digital Crimes Unit, which handled the investigation in collaboration with the financial industry.
Microsoft’s Digital Crimes Unit is worldwide team of investigators, lawyers, analysts and other specialists who fight cybercrime. A year ago they helped U.S. authorities take down a botnet known as Rustock that had been one of the biggest producers of spam e-mail. Some security experts estimated that in its heyday Rustock was responsible for half the spam in junk email bins.
Apple Goes Down In Court
Apple has lost a move in US District Court in San Francisco to keep some of its software ‘secrets’ out of view of the public.
It had asked Judge William Alsup to keep documents sealed that had surfaced in its lawsuit against Psystar, Bloomberg reports. The information about Apple’s Mac OS X operating system covers topics such as technological protection measures, system integrity checks and thermal management techniques.
The court turned down Apple’s request, however, noting that the company didn’t deny that the information was already public or claim that it had been misappropriated. Apple had argued that it still deserved trade secret protection because it didn’t release the information and had never confirmed it, but that didn’t convince Judge Alsup.
The information at issue is available on a web site about the Mac OS X operating system, the judge noted, adding that Apple’s decryption key haiku is available to any user that compiles and runs publicly available source code on a Macbook Air laptop.
.
Yahoo Wins Major Lawsuit
December 17, 2011 by admin
Filed under Around The Net
Comments Off on Yahoo Wins Major Lawsuit
Yahoo has achieved a big victory against spammers, a legal victory that also includes a default judgment of $610 million.
In the lawsuit, filed in May 2008, Yahoo targeted a variety of individuals and companies, accusing them of trying to defraud people via a spam campaign that falsely informed email recipients that they had won prizes in a non-existent Yahoo-sponsored lottery.
Yahoo alleged that the defendants’ goal was to trick email recipients into providing them with personal and financial information that could be used to commit fraud by raiding victims’ bank accounts, using their credit cards and applying for loans on their behalf.
Judge Laura Taylor Swain from the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York ruled that Yahoo’s allegations are “uncontroverted” and said the company is entitled to $27 million in statutory damages for trademark infringement and $583 million in statutory damages for violation of the CAN-SPAM Act.
It’s not clear whether Yahoo will be able to collect the money. A default judgment is rendered when defendants in a case fail to plead or defend an action, as happened in this case, in which the defendants never responded to Yahoo’s complaint.
Hackers Attempt To Access AT&T Mobile
November 30, 2011 by admin
Filed under Smartphones
Comments Off on Hackers Attempt To Access AT&T Mobile
AT&T Inc, the No. 2 U.S. wireless carrier, said it is investigating an “organized and systemic attempt” to access mobile customers’ information but that it did not believe any accounts were breached.
The company, which had 100 million subscribers at the end of the third quarter, said it is advising less than 1 percent of its wireless customers that there was an attempt to obtain information about their accounts.
It said that the parties involved appeared to have used “auto script” technology to see if AT&T telephone numbers were linked to online AT&T accounts.
Spokesman Mark Siegel said AT&T’s “investigation is ongoing to determine the source or intent of the attempt to gather this information.”
.
November 16, 2011 by admin
Filed under Smartphones
Comments Off on
Google, which last week created a bit of chaos with the launch of a Gmail application for Apple iOS devices, has decided to put out discontinue its Gmail application for the BlackBerry.
As of Nov. 22, Google will no longer offer technical support to users of the application, nor will it allow people to download it anymore, the company wrote in a blog post.
However, people will be able to continue using it, although Google will put its development efforts on the version of the application for mobile browsers, available at gmail.com.