61331001
submission
jfruh writes:
Google famously custom-builds its own servers and data centers to accommodate its massive compute needs. But Urs Hölzle, Google's senior VP in charge of technical infrastructure, says that this is an entirely utilitarian strategy — that nobody else was offering the capabilities to provide compute power at the price that Google needed — and that once the cloud computing industry ramps up and uses the techniques Google pioneered, the company will be happy to rent time on other people's servers.
61330855
submission
jfruh writes:
As part of its censorship blitz around this month's 25th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, China has cut off access to Dropbox for its citizens. While most Chinese use home-grown file-sharing cloud services like Baidu, Dropbox represented an opportunity to share information with those outside Chinese government control — an opportunity that has now been quashed.
61330059
submission
itwbennett writes:
Responding to more than a year of pressure, Google and Microsoft will follow Apple in adding an anti-theft "kill switch" to their smartphone operating systems. In New York, iPhone theft was down 19 percent in the first five months of this year. Over the same period, thefts of Samsung devices — which did not include a kill switch until one was introduced on Verizon-only models in April — rose by over 40 percent. In San Francisco, robberies of iPhones were 38 percent lower in the six months after the iOS 7 introduction versus the six months before, while in London thefts over the same period were down by 24 percent. In both cities, robberies of Samsung devices increased. 'These statistics validate what we always knew to be true, that a technological solution has the potential to end the victimization of wireless consumers everywhere,' said San Francisco District Attorney George Gascon.
61313913
submission
itwbennett writes:
The ongoing congestion study, by MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and the Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis at the University of California's San Diego (UCSD) Supercomputer Center, is preliminary and doesn't assign fault for congestion, but it does point to a poor experience for ISP customers and Netflix, said David Clark, a senior research scientist at MIT. Traffic congestion at interconnection points between broadband providers and backbone providers doesn't appear to be widespread, with congestion often just two or three hours a day, said Clark. But in some cases, U.S. ISPs have experienced periods of congestion on interconnection points with backbone providers that last for months at a time. For their parts, representatives of both Netflix and the cable broadband industry said the study supports their positions on who's to blame for the congestion.
61298541
submission
jfruh writes:
Under European laws, personal data of EU citizens can't be transferred to countries that don't meet EU standards for data protection. The US doesn't meet those standards, but American companies have worked around this by using EU standards for the data of European citizens, even that data stored on servers outside of Europe. Now the EU's highest court will decide if this workaround is good enough — especially in light of revelations of the NSA's Prism data-mining program.
61298391
submission
jfruh writes:
If you were looking to make contact with cybercriminals who have harvested people's credit card numbers, you don't need to go to some secret, sketchy part of the Internet: you can just go right to YouTube, where thousands of videos advertise credit card numbers for sale. Ironically, many of these YouTube videos feature ads for legitimate credit card companies, who are therefore subsidizing the theives, to Google's profit.
61298229
submission
jfruh writes:
Anyone who's struggled to set up a home Wi-Fi network knows that signals can be easily dropped or blocked by walls and other physical objects. MIT researchers have been trying to figure out ways to filter out Wi-Fi interference, and in the process have turned Wi-Fi signals into a radar-like technology that can measure extremely subtle movements through walls. While the researchers have touted the tech as leading to health monitoring benefits — checking on a baby's breathing in the next room, say — the law enforcement and surveillance possibilities are obvious.
61265381
submission
jfruh writes:
MIT researchers have developed a protocol they call HTTPA, or Accountable HTTP, that aims to give users more control over their private data. The protocol marks any data the user deems private with restrictions on use before its sent over the Internet to requesting systems. And users will be able to see who else on the Internet is requesting that specific data — although that aspect of the system requires a trusted third-party monitor, which opens further privacy questions.
61265277
submission
jfruh writes:
Most people associate field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) with flexibility, not power or performance. But Microsoft's Bing division thinks they've found a way to improve Bing server throughput by adding FPGA boards, a particularly important acheivement considering that standard server chip performance is levelling off.
61233491
submission
jfruh writes:
The European Commission and the South Korean government announced that they will be harmonizing their radio spectrum policy in an attempt to help bring 5G wireless tech to market by 2020. While the technology is still in an embryonic state, but one South Korean researcher predicts it could be over a thousand times faster than current 4G networks.
61233425
submission
jfruh writes:
The scene was a little surreal. Bill Gates, who became one of the world's richest men by ruthlessly making Microsoft one of the word's most profitable companies, was giving a commencement address at Stanford, the elite university at the heart of Silicon Valley whose graduates go on to the endless tech startups bubbling up looking for Facebook-style riches. But the theme of Gates's speech was that the pursuit of profit cannot solve the world's problems.
61158519
submission
jfruh writes:
HP's revelation that it's working on a radical new computing architecture that it's dubbed 'The Machine' was met with excitement among tech observers this week, but one of HP's biggest competitors remains extremely unimpressed. John Swanson, the head of Dell's software business, said that 'The notion that you can reach some magical state by rearchitecting an OS is laughable on the face of it.' And Jai Memnon, Dell's research head, said that phase-change memory is the memory type in the pipeline mostly like to change the computing scene soon, not the memristors that HP is working on.
61158325
submission
jfruh writes:
After a security breach resulted in credit card details from P.F. Chang's cusomters being traded on online 'carding' forums, the restaurant chain is scrambling to lock down its systems, and temporarily going back to the past: customer credit card information is being taken by mechanical readers that physically impress the numbers onto carbon paper.
61138621
submission
itwbennett writes:
Personal information, including Social Security numbers and call records, was accessed for an unknown number of AT&T Mobility customers by people outside of the company, AT&T has confirmed. The breach took place between April 9-21, but was only disclosed this week in a filing with California regulators. While AT&T wouldn't say how many customers were affected, state law requires such disclosures if an incident affects at least 500 customers in California.
61138283
submission
itwbennett writes:
The U.S. government has lifted a long-standing restriction that meant companies like Google and Microsoft didn't have access to the most accurate pictures taken by imaging satellites. Satellite operator DigitalGlobe said that it received approval from the U.S. Department of Commerce this week to sell sharper images to its clients. Until now, satellite operators like DigitalGlobe were prevented by law from selling images to foreign or commercial organizations in which features smaller than 50 centimeters were visible. The restriction was meant to ensure that foreign powers didn't get access to satellite images that were too good.
