67990155
submission
jfruh writes:
Google Chairman Eric Schmidt told a conference on surveillance at the Cato Institute that Edward Snowden's revelations on NSA spying shocked the company's engineers — who then immediately started working on making the company's servers and services more secure. Now, after a year and a half of work, Schmidt says that Google's services are the safest place to store your sensistive data.
67989755
submission
jfruh writes:
A company called Max Sound has filed a lawsuit against Google and YouTube in Germany over a streaming video patent it holds, but this could be the beginning of a much, much bigger fight. Max Sound claims its patent gives it rights over anyone who uses the H.264 video compression format, which is just about anyone who streams video over the web.
67712533
submission
jfruh writes:
Solid-state drives give an immense performance boost to computers that use them, and memory prices are dropping to the point where they can compete with traditional hard drives on price. And yet worries persist that solid-state memory simply isn't a durable or reliable as hard disks. But a recent long-term test might put those worries to bed, showing that high-quality SSDs on the market today have lifetimes that can be measured in decades, or even centuries.
67628163
submission
jfruh writes:
The Bluetooth spec never quite became the worldbeater it was billed as, but it's aiming to become indispensible to the Internet of Things. Updates to the spec make it possible for low-powered Bluetooth devices to gain direct access to the Internet, and, perhaps more importantly, make those devices a lot harder to hack.
67627855
submission
jfruh writes:
With Microsoft aiming to make more money from cloud services and software subscriptions, some have speculated that Windows itself might be given away for free with the aim of locking users into Microsoft's ecosystem. But company COO Kevin Turner says that, while Windows 10 pricing hasn't been decided yet, it definitely won't be a "loss leader".
67512639
submission
jfruh writes:
In 2012, Microsoft invested $300 million in Barnes & Noble's Nook division. This week, Microsoft agreed to sell its interest back to B&N so that the struggling bookstore could try to spin the division off as a separate business or sell it. The sale price was so low that Microsoft essentially lost nearly $190,000 every day on the botched attempt to gain access to the e-reader ecosystem.
67512491
submission
jfruh writes:
One of the EU's selling points is that it provides a single regulatory apparatus for the entire European market — but this isn't the case for everything. Data protection laws, for instance, provide a confusing thicket of different regulations across the continent, and now, much to the frustration of large American Internet companies, it seems that a plan to consolidate these rules under a single EU agency are coming apart.
67482131
submission
jfruh writes:
Google Glass, launched with such fanfare and promise, is now at risk of becoming a punchline. But Google's announcement that future Glass models will use Intel chips might help that turn around, with the chipmaking giant providing boosts in two wildly disparate areas: computing power and marketing savvy.
67389893
submission
jfruh writes:
Fujisawa Sustainable Smart Town is a subdivision taking shape southwest of Tokyo. Built buy Panasonic, it aims to eventually produce zero CO2, but in the short term will reduce CO2 emissions by 70 percent compared to 1990 levels, as well as reducing water use by 30 percent. The town features lots and lots of solar panels, and, as you might expect, lots and lots of Panasonic appliances and gadgets.
67389735
submission
jfruh writes:
Hewlett-Packard acknowledges that its Unix business is in decline. However, the company also knows those customers remaining need support, and has rolled out a roadmap for its HP-UX Unix variant that will keep it up-to-date until 2025.
67338397
submission
jfruh writes:
Big companies like Google may need to fill seats with high-skilled workers, but smaller companies — which often fit the profile of the hip workplaces people dream of — still have the luxury of picking and choosing. That's why applicants' social skills and "cultural fit" are so important, which may shatter your dreams of tech as a clique-free meritocracy.
67338113
submission
jfruh writes:
Websites that sell counterfeit goods are being hit where it hurts: their domain names, leaving them unable to conduct commerce online at all. A Christmas-shopping-timed move by US and EU officials have put 292 domain names under the control of law enforcement. It's not clear what burden of proof lies on the police here.
67266685
submission
jfruh writes:
Driverless vehicles are coming. The question is: what form will they take? Uber's management has suggested that, rather than owning our own private autonomous, cars, we'll all be glad to pay Uber by the trip for a private ride in one. But an Italian consultant working on experimental driverless vehicles in Europe thinks that the future will lie with automated buses, because diverless cars, 'may be able to go and park themselves out of harm’s way, they may be able to do more trips per day, but they will still need a 10 ft wide lane to move a flow of 3600 persons per hour ... their advantages completely fade away in an urban street, where the frequent obstacles and interruptions will make robots provide a performance that will be equal, or worse than, that of a human driver, at least in terms of capacity and density.'
67105085
submission
jfruh writes:
An report from Xinhua, China's state-run news agency, desscribes a hefty bill for unpaid back taxes paid by "M company," a tech firm described in terms that seem to only fit Microsoft's Chinese subsidiary. The company apparently used accounting trickery to hide profits, resulting in an investigation and a hefty back tax bill.
67104937
submission
jfruh writes:
Slack is a chat service that is taking agile workplaces by storm. But you need to think of it like email and other company-controlled communications mediums: not private. Slack is offering an upcoming paid Plus plan that will give employers wide-ranging access to their employee chats.
