As partner conference kicks off, Microsoft details Win10 launch plans and moreWith Windows 10 set to roll out in just two weeks, Microsoft on Monday shed some light on the marketing support it will put behind the launch: a worldwide, year-long “upgrade your world” ad campaign. And at its annual Worldwide Partner Conference that started in Orlando, Microsoft rolled out a new analytics tool that aims to democratize access to big data using the Cortana voice interface, as well as Project Gigjam, which can pull data from multiple applications into a shared workspace.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
As partner conference kicks off, Microsoft details Win10 launch plans and moreWith Windows 10 set to roll out in just two weeks, Microsoft on Monday shed some light on the marketing support it will put behind the launch: a worldwide, year-long “upgrade your world” ad campaign. And at its annual Worldwide Partner Conference that started in Orlando, Microsoft rolled out a new analytics tool that aims to democratize access to big data using the Cortana voice interface, as well as Project Gigjam, which can pull data from multiple applications into a shared workspace.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Power to the people: Facebook news feed tool lets users prioritize postsDespite all that it knows about us, Facebook has conceded that it can’t do such a good job of guessing which items we’d like to see in our news feeds. It’s adding a tool that will let users pick the content they see first. It’s a minor victory for users who want to wrest control from algorithms and have greater influence over the information they get from social networking sites. Selected posts from friends or pages belonging to organizations and businesses will show up with a star in the top right corner.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Power to the people: Facebook news feed tool lets users prioritize postsDespite all that it knows about us, Facebook has conceded that it can’t do such a good job of guessing which items we’d like to see in our news feeds. It’s adding a tool that will let users pick the content they see first. It’s a minor victory for users who want to wrest control from algorithms and have greater influence over the information they get from social networking sites. Selected posts from friends or pages belonging to organizations and businesses will show up with a star in the top right corner.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
NYSE halts trading as IT systems go down... but it’s no cyberattackTrading on the New York Stock Exchange halted for over three hours Wednesday due to unspecified computer problems. The exchange quickly ruled out a cyberattack, which means there are likely to be red faces in the NYSE IT department when the cause is uncovered.Microsoft lays off 7,800 staff as it dials down its smartphone ambitionsA little over a year after buying Nokia’s smartphone division, Microsoft is laying off all but one-sixth of the division’s staff, and writing off $7.6 billion, almost all of its purchase price. CEO Satya Nadella reportedly never liked the acquisition, set in motion by his predecessor Steve Ballmer, and now plans to slim down the bewildering array of Lumia phones the company makes, more tightly integrating them with Windows 10.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
NYSE halts trading as IT systems go down... but it’s no cyberattackTrading on the New York Stock Exchange halted for over three hours Wednesday due to unspecified computer problems. The exchange quickly ruled out a cyberattack, which means there are likely to be red faces in the NYSE IT department when the cause is uncovered.Microsoft lays off 7,800 staff as it dials down its smartphone ambitionsA little over a year after buying Nokia’s smartphone division, Microsoft is laying off all but one-sixth of the division’s staff, and writing off $7.6 billion, almost all of its purchase price. CEO Satya Nadella reportedly never liked the acquisition, set in motion by his predecessor Steve Ballmer, and now plans to slim down the bewildering array of Lumia phones the company makes, more tightly integrating them with Windows 10.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Road trip! Google’s self-driving cars test out the streets of Austin, TexasGoogle has picked Austin, Texas, as the second location to test its self-driving vehicles, expanding the trials beyond Mountain View, California. One of Google’s self-driving Lexus sport utility vehicles is already on Austin’s streets, the company said Tuesday. Until now, public road tests of Google’s self-driving technology took place only around Mountain View, where the search company has its headquarters. Expanding the trial area will allow Google to test its software in a location with different road conditions, traffic patterns and driving situations, the company said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Privacy group files FTC complaint to push Google to extend right to be forgotten to USFirst they ignore you, then they laugh at you.... After a year of ridiculing a European court’s “right to be forgotten” ruling, it seems that some Americans at least are beginning to think it’s a good idea. The ruling required search engines to exclude certain pages containing personal information from their search results on request from the people concerned. Now Consumer Watchdog has asked the U.S. Federal Trade Commission to institute a similar right.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Surveillance firm Hacking Team gets hackedWho watches the watchmen? Italian online surveillance company Hacking Team appears to have been hacked, with attackers releasing what purports to be a trove of internal documents showing how the company helps governments around the world spy on their citizens. CSO has the details.Microsoft’s $2.5B marketing budget: Minecraft on Windows 10Is Microsoft counting on pester power to push Windows 10 sales? The company will release a special version of Minecraft for its new operating system when it goes on sale at the end of this month, PC World reports. Minecraft’s author Markus “Notch” Persson famously said he would rather not see the game on PCs at all than have it distributed through the Windows store—but since Microsoft paid $2.5 billion for his company Mojang last year, it calls the shots.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Want an IPv4 address? Get in lineCould IPv6’s day be near? The stockpile of unused IPv4 addresses in North America has fallen so low that there’s now a waiting list. On Wednesday, for the first time, the American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN) had to tell an applicant for new Internet addresses to wait. ARIN simply didn’t have any blocks of addresses big enough to satisfy that applicant’s needs.HP makes its PC/enterprise split officialHewlett-Packard has filed paperwork with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to register HP Enterprise as an independent company, an official step on the path to splitting itself in two. The filing shows that HP Enterprise made a profit of $1.6 billion last year on revenue of $55.1 billion, down from a profit of $2.1 billion on revenue of $57.4 billion in 2013.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Want an IPv4 address? Get in lineCould IPv6’s day be near? The stockpile of unused IPv4 addresses in North America has fallen so low that there’s now a waiting list. On Wednesday, for the first time, the American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN) had to tell an applicant for new Internet addresses to wait. ARIN simply didn’t have any blocks of addresses big enough to satisfy that applicant’s needs.HP makes its PC/enterprise split officialHewlett-Packard has filed paperwork with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to register HP Enterprise as an independent company, an official step on the path to splitting itself in two. The filing shows that HP Enterprise made a profit of $1.6 billion last year on revenue of $55.1 billion, down from a profit of $2.1 billion on revenue of $57.4 billion in 2013.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Court says NSA can keep collecting phone records even after Congress told it to stopThe National Security Agency just doesn’t want to stop collecting records of U.S. telephone calls. Congress told it to stop—but left a loophole in the USA Freedom Act so the courts could let it carry on. Now a U.S. surveillance court has approved a request from the FBI to extend the telephone records dragnet until Nov. 29. As the judge noted in his order: “The more things change, the more they stay the same.”Vandal cuts cable after opening manhole: FBI looks into itTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Government personnel agency takes background check system offline for background checksHoping to avoid a third strike against it, the U.S. Office of Personnel Management has taken offline a system used for performing background checks on potential new hires. The agency discovered a security flaw in the web app, E-QIP, while auditing its IT systems after two spectacular hacks resulted in the theft of personnel records of millions of government employees and the security clearance questionnaires of many others. There is no evidence the flaw was exploited, OPM said Monday, but it will keep the system offline for up to six weeks while it checks it out.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Self-driving cars face off when Google’s cuts off Delphi’sWith developers of autonomous vehicle technology releasing their projects into the wild, it was perhaps inevitable that two self-driving cars would eventually meet on the road. Google’s certainly seems to be programmed for assertive behavior: According to the director of Delphi Labs, one of Google’s self-driving Lexus RX test vehicles cut off Delphi’s test car on a street in Mountain View, California. Apparently the Delphi vehicle did as your parents advised and drove defensively, preventing a collision.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Microsoft vet throws open Snowflake data warehouseStartup Snowflake Computing has opened its cloud-based data warehouse service for business. The company, headed by Microsoft veteran Bob Muglia, is offering a service that lets companies pool all their data and workloads in a single warehouse that can be accessed by all their users. It’s also capable of taking in both structured and semi-structured data.Google brings a green data center to a coal-fired plantGoogle is building a new data center inside a former coal-fired power plant in Alabama, and is asking the regional utility to find renewable energy sources and bring them online to power the facility, the New York Times reports. It pointed out the practical reasons to use the old plant: it’s a solid building, obviously has good power lines, and also has access to lots of water needed for cooling.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Ford drives into car-sharing spaceAs car-sharing and ride-hailing apps make it ever easier for people, especially the urban young, to shrug off the expense of actually owning a car, at least one automaker wants to get in the driver’s seat and steer the trend in a more favorable direction. Ford is launching a pilot car-sharing program in six U.S. cities and London, CNBC reports, and will let customers who use the carmaker’s financing program rent out their vehicle via the Getaround sharing app.U.S. government is falling behind on application securityU.S. government organizations are struggling when it comes to securing the software they use, according to a report by application security firm Veracode that puts government in dead last place among all sectors. Problems include use of old scripting and programming languages, failure to self-regulate and failure to impose security requirements on software suppliers.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Privacy group wants Uber probed for data collectionThe Electronic Privacy Information Center has complained to the U.S. Federal Trade Commission about Uber’s new data collection policy: it comes into effect next month and allows the company to access a customer’s location even when the smartphone app is not actively in use, and to access the information from users’ phone address books and send out promotional materials to contacts listed there. The changes “ignore past bad practices of the company involving the misuse of location data, pose a direct risk of consumer harm, and constitute an unfair and deceptive trade practice,” EPIC said in its request for an FTC investigation.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Google’s data centers grow so fast it has to build its own networksGoogle has been building its own software-defined data-center networks for 10 years because traditional gear can’t handle the scale of what are essentially warehouse-sized computers. The company hasn’t said much before about that homegrown infrastructure, but one of its networking chiefs provided some details this week about the current network design that powers all of Google’s data centers and has a maximum capacity of a whopping 1.13 petabits per second.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Microsoft hands control of devices to Windows boss Myerson, pushes Elop overboardStephen Elop is leaving Microsoft for a second time, as CEO Satya Nadella hands control of the devices division he ran to Windows chief Terry Myerson, Computerworld reports. Elop previously left Microsoft to run Nokia, rejoining his former employer when it bought Nokia’s smartphone business. Myerson will now run the combined “Windows and Devices Group,” making him one of his own best customers.Uber goes to court in California to deny a driver employee rightsTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Say it ain’t so: FBI probes alleged Cardinals-Astros hackEven America’s pastime isn’t safe from cybercrime: the FBI is investigating allegations that the St. Louis Cardinals hacked into computer systems belonging to rival baseball team the Houston Astros. The investigation centers on the baseball operations database, which is said to contain statistics, video and other vital information about players.Airbus joins the Internet satellite crowdCount European consortium Airbus in on the business of delivering Internet service via satellites, the Verge reports. It’s going to design and build 900 orbiters for Richard Branson’s OneWeb, which aims to provide LTE, 3G, and Wi-Fi to rural communities.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
IDG News Service staff