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Microsoft Drops The Surface
Microsoft has dropped the prices on its Surface RT tablets by as much as 30%, with the entry-level 32GB model selling for $349.
The 64GB Surface RT was also discounted by $150, and now sells for $449, or 25% off its former price.
When Microsoft launched the tablet, it sold the 32GB device for $499 and the 64GB configuration for $599.
Microsoft started selling the Surface RT at the lower prices Sunday, as did some of its U.S. retail partners, including Best Buy and Staples. On its website, Staples noted that the discounted prices are valid until July 20, and only while supplies last.
Microsoft’s website, however, listed no caveats, hinting that the lower prices might be permanent or at least will be honored for longer than one week.
The prices are another attempt by Microsoft to clear its existing inventory in preparation for a second-generation line of Windows RT devices. Previously, Microsoft had launched multiple deals to rid itself of the poor-selling tablet, most recently in June when it slashed prices by 60% in a bid to get universities and K-12 schools to buy the device.
Earlier, it kicked off a buy-a-Surface-RT-get-a-free-cover deal that ran until June 30. And at several conferences, including June’s TechEd North America and this month’s Microsoft Partner Conference, the company sold attendees a 64GB Surface RT for $100, 83% off list price.
Today’s sale prices were nearly Microsoft’s cost, which according to estimates of the tablet’s component prices, runs the company at least $284 for the 32GB Surface RT.
Microsoft has not abandoned Windows RT, the pared-down operating system that powers the Surface RT, but virtually every third-party OEM has either pointedly ignored the OS or publicly announced that they would not support it with devices of their own. Instead, the OEMs have flocked to Windows 8 Pro, even though some analysts question the value of touch devices on a platform whose biggest selling point is legacy software that doesn’t support touch.
Microsoft has not revealed sales figures for the Surface line — which also includes the Surface Pro, powered by Windows 8 Pro — but estimates by research firms like IDC have been lackluster.
Collaborating Viruses Showing Up
Two computer viruses are collaborating to defeat clean-up operations. Microsoft researcher Hyun Choi has found that the pair of viruses foil removal by regularly downloading updated versions of their malware partner.
It is the first time that such a defense plan has been noticed before. Choi said that the Vobfus and Beebone viruses, were regularly found together. Vobfus was the first to arrive on a machine, he said, and used different tactics to infect victims. Vobfus could be installed via booby-trapped links on websites, travel via network links to other machines or lurk on USB drives and infect machines they are plugged into.
Once installed, Vobfus downloaded Beebone which enrolled the machine into a botnet. After this the two start to work together to regularly download new versions of each other. If Vobfus was detected and remediated, it could have downloaded an undetected Beebone which can in turn download an undetected variant of Vobfus.
Vobfus become a persistent problem since 2009 when it first appeared.
Yahoo Still Playing Pac-Man
July 16, 2013 by admin
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Yahoo announced on Wednesday that it bought Qwiki for an undisclosed sum, as the firm’s spending spree continues.
Qwiki started out as a video focused search engine in 2011, before making its way into the iTunes Store as an app that turns images and videos into digital story boards.
Yahoo announced its acquisition of Qwiki on Wednesday, although it kept quiet about what it plans to do with the company and how much it spent. However, according to Allthingsd, Yahoo spent approximately $50m to further expand its digital offerings.
What’s more, while it’s unclear what Yahoo’s plans are at present, it’s likely that the firm is looking to challenge Vine and Instagram in the social video market.
Yahoo announced the news, naturally, on Tumblr. It said, “We’re excited to announce that Yahoo acquired Qwiki – a company that uses awesome technology to bring together pictures, music and video to capture the art of storytelling.
“We will continue to support the Qwiki app, and the team will join Yahoo in our New York city office to reimagine Yahoo’s storytelling experience. Stay tuned … there’s much more to come!”
Qwiki also had something to say, posting on its website, “Thank you for being a part of our story – one which is far from over. The Qwiki app will live on as a standalone entity inside Yahoo, where we will grow our thriving community and where our team will continue to work to help you share life’s best experiences.
“We are proud of the work we’ve done, and humbled by unwavering support from the NY tech community. New York is such a big part of who we are, and what we will become.”
Yahoo’s buyout of Qwiki is the latest in a series of acquisitions by the firm. Recently the firm announced that it bought Tumblr for a cool $1.1bn, with Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer promising “not to screw it up”.
Red Hat Releases Fedora 19
Red Hat has released Fedora 19, codenamed Schrödinger’s Cat, which has support for 3D printing and is the first to use MariaDB as its default SQL database instead of Oracle’s MySQL.
Red Hat’s Fedora Linux distribution is the testing ground for the firm’s hugely successful Enterprise Linux (RHEL) distribution, and for that reason it heralds what will appear in future releases of RHEL. The firm’s Fedora 19 release brings support for 3D printing through OpenSCAD, Skeinforge, SFACT, Printrun and Repetierhost, and it is the first release to make MariaDB the default SQL database server implementation in place of Oracle’s MySQL.
The Fedora Project was criticised for delaying its Fedora 18 release, however Fedora 19 appeared on time. Fedora’s latest release includes Gnome 3.8 and the capability to enable Gnome Classic, a Gnome 2 type user interface, along with KDE Plasma 4.10 and Mate 1.6, with other window managers such as Xfce and Lxde available in different spins.
As Red Hat sponsors the Fedora Project it is not surprising to see Fedora include Openshift, the firm’s platform as a service infrastructure. Fedora 19 also includes node.js and Ruby 2.0, but arguably its biggest move is away from Oracle’s MySQL to the community maintained MariaDB fork, which suggests that eventually RHEL will make MariaDB its default SQL database implementation.
The Fedora Project has said that work on Fedora 20 has been in active development for several months and it plans to release that in November.
Fedora 19 is available for download from regional mirrors and users can also use Fed Up to upgrade from previous versions of the distribution.
Intel Invests In Tablet Business
Intel has invested in E La Carte, a firm that designs tablets for restaurants.
Intel Capital, the chipmaker’s investment arm, has bought into in all sorts of companies outside of semiconductors in a bid to diversify the firm’s income. Now the chipmaker has invested in E La Carte, a firm that designs tablets for use in restaurants.
E La Carte raised a total of $13.5m in second round funding for its niche tablet business, with Intel Capital leading the investment. The firm said it would use the capital injection to grow the firm and to try to increase the number of restaurants that use its tablets.
Christine Herron, director of Intel Capital said, “E La Carte offers the most innovative and reliable guest tablet solution in the industry. We’re thrilled to further accelerate the company’s growth with not only capital, but also our significant resources and expertise in manufacturing, operations, and media.
“As E La Carte transforms the dining experience, we are creating a new market for both restaurant and guest services.”
E La Carte claims to have sold thousands of tablets to restaurants and cites a month on month growth rate of 35 percent. For Intel it is one way of getting a foothold in the tablet market, even if its Clovertrail+ tablets have yet to take the market by storm.
Rajat Suri, CEO of E La Carte said, “We are excited to work with Intel to grow our footprint to more restaurants across the country. With more than 200,000 casual-dining restaurants in the US, we see an enormous opportunity to make full service and fast casual restaurant experiences more enjoyable for guests, and more profitable for restaurant operators.”
Aside from the cash, Intel Capital will also provide advice in manufacturing, operations and media to E La Carte, presumably with the hope of taking the firm public in the future.
Phishing Attacks Increasing
Security researchers at Kaspersky Lab have reported significant growth in phishing attacks over the last year.
In a study entitled “The Evolution of Phishing Attacks”, Kaspersky said it found 37.3 million out of its 50 million customers running its security products that were at risk of being phished from 2012 to the present, an 87 percent increase over the same period between 2011 and 2012.
“The nature of phishing attacks is such that the simplest types can be launched without any major infrastructure investments or in-depth technological research,” Kaspersky said in the report.
“This situation has led to its own form of ‘commercialization’ of these types of attacks, and phishing is now being almost industrialized, both by cybercriminals with professional technological skills and IT dilettantes.”
The security firm explained that overall, the effectiveness of phishing, combined with its profitability for criminals and how simple the process is to undertake has led to a steadily rising number of these types of incidents.
Kaspersky noted that most of the victims in 2012-2013 were located in just ten countries, that is, Russia, the US, India, Germany, Vietnam, the UK, France, Italy, China and Ukraine. These 10 countries were home to 64 percent of all phishing attack victims during this time.
In addition to a rise in the number of users attacked, the number of servers involved in phishing attacks also increased, Kaspersky said, without giving any exact numbers. Though the firm did reveal that internet giants like Yahoo, Google, Facebook and Amazon are the top targets of malicious users.
“Online game services, online payment systems, and the websites of banks and other credit and financial organizations are also common targets,” the firm added, warning users to stay vigilant when entering personal data.
Office 365 Goes Yammer
June 21, 2013 by admin
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Microsoft has taken the first step in its integration roadmap for SharePoint and Yammer, allowing Office 365 customers to swap SharePoint Online’s activity stream with Yammer’s.
This first, modest integration point will let SharePoint Online users click on the Yammer link and launch a separate browser window where they’re asked to sign in.
Later this year, Microsoft will deepen the integration with a single sign-on and the addition of Yammer to the main Office 365 interface, which will begin to merge the two products’ user experience.
Next month, Microsoft will release a Yammer application for SharePoint that will let users embed a Yammer group feed into a SharePoint site. The application will work both with SharePoint Online and with the on-premises version of the server SharePoint 2013.
Also in July, Microsoft will provide instructions for replacing the SharePoint 2013 newsfeed with Yammer’s.
For now, the first integration step in optional, but Microsoft is strongly suggesting that Office 365 customers make the activity stream switch to Yammer.
“Our recommendation is to use Yammer, since it’s our big bet for enterprise social, and we’re committed to making it the underlying social layer for all our products,” wrote Christophe Fiessinger, a Microsoft Office Division product marketing manager, in a blog post.
Customers should also accompany the technical change with an outreach effort to promote the benefits of using the enterprise social networking features of Yammer, according to Fiessinger.
“To drive adoption and really get the value out of Yammer, you need a strategy, advocates, and openness to the way it will transform the way people in your organization work and communicate,” he wrote.
Microsoft bought Yammer for $1.2 billion in mid-2012 in order to boost the development and availability of enterprise social collaboration features in SharePoint and in other Office and Microsoft business software like the Dynamics applications.
Microsoft makes a convincing case for the benefits of integrating Yammer with SharePoint and its other software to provide a common social collaboration layer, but the process is clearly complicated and will take years.
McAffee See Sure In Spam
The first three months of 2013 have seen a surge in spam volume, as well as a growing number of samples of the Koobface social networking worm and master boot record (MBR) infecting malware, according to antivirus vendor McAfee.
After remaining relatively stable throughout 2012, spam levels rose during the first quarter of 2013, reaching the highest volume seen in the past two years, McAfee said in a report released Monday.
The amount of spam originating from some countries rose dramatically, McAfee said. Spam from Belarus increased by 540% while spam originating in Kazakhstan grew 150%.
Cutwail, also known as Pushdo, was the most prevalent spam-sending botnet during the first quarter, McAfee said.
The increased Pushdo activity has recently been observed by other security companies as well. Last month, researchers from security firm Damballa found a new variant of the Pushdo malware that’s more resilient to coordinated takedown efforts.
On the malware front, McAfee has also seen a surge in the number of Koobface samples, which reached previously unseen levels during the first quarter of 2013. First discovered in 2008, Koobface is a worm that spreads via social networking sites, especially through Facebook, by hijacking user accounts.
The number of malware samples designed to infect a computer’s master boot record (MBR) also reached a record high during the first three months of 2013, after increasing during the last quarter of 2012 as well, McAfee said.
The MBR is a special section on a hard disk drive that contains information about its partitions and is used during the system startup operation. “Compromising the MBR offers an attacker a wide variety of control, persistence, and deep penetration,” the McAfee researchers said in the report.
The MBR attacks seen during the first quarter involved malware like StealthMBR, also known as Mebroot; Tidserv, also known as Alureon, TDSS and TDL; Cidox and Shamoon, they said.
Google Updates It’s SSL Certificate
Google has announced plans to upgrade its Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificates to 2048-bit keys by the end of 2013 to strengthen its SSL implementation.
Announcing the news on a blog post today, Google’s director of information security engineering Stephen McHenry said it will begin switching to the new 2048-bit certificates on 1 August to ensure adequate time for a careful rollout before the end of the year.
“We’re also going to change the root certificate that signs all of our SSL certificates because it has a 1024-bit key,” McHenry said.
“Most client software won’t have any problems with either of these changes, but we know that some configurations will require some extra steps to avoid complications. This is more often true of client software embedded in devices such as certain types of phones, printers, set-top boxes, gaming consoles, and cameras.”
McHenry advised that for a smooth upgrade, client software that makes SSL connections to Google, for example, HTTPS must: “perform normal validation of the certificate chain; include a properly extensive set of root certificates contained […]; and support Subject Alternative Names (SANs)”.
He also recommended that clients support the Server Name Indication (SNI) extension because they might need to make an extra API call to set the hostname on an SSL connection.
He pointed out some of the problems that the change might trigger, and pointed to a FAQ addressing certificate changes, as well as instructions for developers on how to adapt to certificate changes.
F-secure’s security researcher Sean Sullivan advised, “By updating its SSL standards, Google will make it easier to spot forged certificates.
“Certificate authorities have been abused and/or hacked in the past. I imagine it will be more difficult to forge one of these upgraded certs. Therefore, users can have more confidence.”
Is This A Mobile First World?
June 3, 2013 by admin
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Judging from the number of people engrossed in activities with their smartphones on the sidewalk, in their cars and in public places, mobile seems to have stolen our attention away from the wired Internet and traditional TV.
However, there is a ways to go before mobile platforms become the primary place where consumers turn for entertainment and getting things done, players at CTIA Wireless trade show said.
Nokia Siemens Networks announced new capabilities in its network software to make video streams run more smoothly over mobile networks. Among other things, the enhancements can reduce video stalling by 90 percent, according to the company. But even Sandro Tavares, head of marketing for NSN’s Mobile Core business, sees “mobile-first” viewing habits as part of the future.
“Now that the networks are providing a better capacity, a better experience with mobile broadband, mobile-first will come,” Tavares said. “Because the experiences they have with the devices are so good, these devices … start to be their preferred screen, their first screen.
“This is a trend, and this is something that will not change,” Tavares said. But he thinks it’s too early to build networks assuming consumers will turn to tablets and phones as their primary sources of entertainment. “Do you have to be prepared for mobile-first now? Probably not. You have to be able to keep the pace.”
For AT&T, mobile-first is a top priority for its own internal apps, ensuring employees can do their jobs wherever they are, said Kris Rinne, the carrier’s senior vice president of network technologies. But to make it possible over the network, a range of new technologies and relationships may have to come together, she said.
For example, giving the best possible performance for streaming video and other uses of mobile may require steering traffic to the right network if both cellular and Wi-Fi are available. AT&T is developing an “intelligent network selection” capability to do this, Rinne said. When AT&T starts to deliver voice over LTE, it will stay on the cellular network — at least in the early days — because the carrier has more control over quality of service on that system, she said.
Other issues raised by mobile-first include security of packets going over the air and rights for content that subscribers are consuming primarily on mobile devices instead of through TV and other traditional channels, Rinne said.