If you've ever downloaded software, chances are you've experienced an all-too-common surprise: ads or other unwanted programs that tagged along for the ride, only to pop up on your PC uninvited. Turns out there's a highly lucrative global industry making it happen, with "layers of deniability" to protect those involved.That's according to researchers from Google and New York University's Tandon School of Engineering, who will present this week what they say is the first analysis of the link between so-called "pay-per-install" (PPI) practices and the distribution of unwanted software.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
A group of privacy advocates and internet providers has filed a new challenge to the U.K. government's use of bulk hacking abroad.
U.K.-based Privacy International and five internet and communications providers aim to "bring the government's hacking under the rule of law," they said in a case lodged Friday with the European Court of Human Rights.
Their application challenges the U.K. Investigatory Powers Tribunal's (IPT's) February refusal to rule on whether hacking efforts outside the U.K. by the GCHQ British intelligence service comply with the European Convention on Human Rights. That decision was part of a case brought by Privacy International against GCHQ back in 2014, and it effectively meant that the U.K. government could lawfully conduct bulk hacking of computers, mobile devices, and networks located anywhere outside of the UK, the group said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
A group of privacy advocates and internet providers has filed a new challenge to the U.K. government's use of bulk hacking abroad.
U.K.-based Privacy International and five internet and communications providers aim to "bring the government's hacking under the rule of law," they said in a case lodged Friday with the European Court of Human Rights.
Their application challenges the U.K. Investigatory Powers Tribunal's (IPT's) February refusal to rule on whether hacking efforts outside the U.K. by the GCHQ British intelligence service comply with the European Convention on Human Rights. That decision was part of a case brought by Privacy International against GCHQ back in 2014, and it effectively meant that the U.K. government could lawfully conduct bulk hacking of computers, mobile devices, and networks located anywhere outside of the UK, the group said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Microsoft has made no secret of its grand plans for chat bots, and this week it rolled out five new ones for Skype. Surely the most fun is "Spock," a bot that promises to help you "learn the ways of Vulcan logic."Back in April, Microsoft debuted a preview of Skype bots, the artificial intelligence-based helpers it hopes will make it easier for users to get things done. Today, more than 30,000 developers are building bots for Skype, it says.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Ten months after Dropbox first unveiled Paper, the collaborative writing tool entered open beta on Wednesday and is getting mobile versions for iOS and Android.Paper allows teams to work on documents together in the cloud. It makes it easy to add text, images, and embedded videos from YouTube, Google, or Dropbox itself. Users can also add programming code, which gets formatted automatically. And they can create to-do lists and assign tasks on those lists using the @ symbol.
Since its debut in private beta, Paper has been used to create more than a million documents for tasks like brainstorming ideas and capturing meeting notes, Dropbox said. Based on lessons learned along the way, Dropbox has improved the software with better tables and image galleries, more powerful search, and notifications via desktop and mobile.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
A business-ready Office alternativeImage by LibreOfficeLibreOffice is a free and open source alternative to Microsoft's Office productivity software that boasts some 120 million users around the globe. Version 5.2 made its debut on Wednesday, and it's packed with new business features. Here's a look at what you'll find.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Hard on the heels of its Demandware acquisition in June, Salesforce confirmed on Monday that it's acquiring cloud collaboration software maker Quip.The purchase price is $582 million, plus the value of Salesforce's previous investments in the company, according to a regulatory filing late last week. According to one estimate, the total value amounts to roughly $750 million.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
There are plenty of companies vying for a piece of the worldwide cloud infrastructure market, but the top four -- all in the U.S. -- currently dominate by such a wide margin as to effectively leave their competitors in the dust.That's the overriding conclusion of a study released Monday by Synergy Research Group, which provides quarterly market tracking and segmentation data, including vendor revenues by segment and region.Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, IBM, and Google collectively control more than half of the worldwide cloud infrastructure service market, Synergy found, with an overwhelming lead by AWS, which held a 31 percent share in the second quarter. Microsoft came next with 11 percent, while IBM weighed in at 8 percent, and Google came in with 5 percent.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
IBM saw from the get-go that the cloud was going to cause a major disruption to its business.
"We knew it was a massive opportunity for IBM, but not in a way that necessarily fit our mold," said Jim Comfort, who is now CTO for IBM Cloud. "Every dimension of our business model would change -- we knew that going in."
Change they have, and there's little denying that the cloud businesses is now a ray of sunshine brightening IBM's outlook as its legacy businesses struggle. In its second-quarter earnings report last week, cloud revenue was up 30 percent for the quarter year over year, reaching $11.6 billion over the preceding 12 months. Revenue from systems hardware and operating systems software, on the other hand, was down more than 23 percent.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Oracle's US$9.3 billion purchase of NetSuite may be the most anticipated acquisition in the history of enterprise software."It’s like the high school sweethearts you always knew would get married but they had to get through four years of college first," said analyst Frank Scavo, president of Strativa.There's no denying the two companies share a long history. Not only was Oracle chairman and chief technology officer Larry Ellison an early backer of NetSuite, but both NetSuite founder Evan Goldberg and CEO Zach Nelson spent time at Oracle.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
AI has already been dabbling in the arts for some time, but recently it took a big step further and helped write its first feature-length horror film. Now its co-creators are seeking funding to bring the movie to life.Titled "Impossible Things," the story focuses on a family that moves to a secluded country home following the death of a young daughter. Madeline, the mother, stays home to renovate the house and care for her remaining two children, but she begins to hear voices. She also sees visions of a deranged woman and the ghost of a child remarkably similar to the one she lost.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Real-time bidding is an aspect of digital marketing that can seem overly complex for the average bear, so it was only a matter of time before AI entered the picture. This week, Google brought machine learning into the process to help make it easier.Tapping some of the same artificial-intelligence technologies that have already appeared in Google Photos and AlphaGo, Smart Bidding is a new capability for conversion-based automated bidding across AdWords and DoubleClick Search to help companies determine their optimal bid for any given campaign or portfolio. It can factor in millions of signals, Google says, and continually refines models of users' conversion performance at different bid levels.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
IBM's Watson may be putting its cognitive muscle to work battling cancer and cybercriminals, but it's no slouch at shopping, either. On Wednesday, retail brand Macy's announced that it's testing out a new mobile service that lets in-store shoppers ask Watson for help.Dubbed Macy’s On-Call, the tool gives smartphone-equipped shoppers a way to ask Watson questions about a store's products, services and facilities by typing their questions into a mobile browser. It's delivered through location-based engagement software from IBM partner Satisfi, which accesses Watson from the cloud, and it works in both English and Spanish.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Big data may promise a world of new insight, but if it can't be analyzed, you can kiss that potential goodbye. Enter Teradata and Nuix, which on Tuesday teamed up to bring so-called "dark data" to light.Dark data is generally considered any data that gets overlooked and underused, often because employees don't know it's there or don't know how to access it. It's widely thought that dark data accounts for a majority of most companies' information assets.Through their partnership, the companies will integrate Nuix's namesake data processing and indexing engine with Teradata's Aster Analytics software, giving organizations a new way to uncover their dark data and analyze it on the spot.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The FBI is using antiquated computer systems to deliberately foil requests made under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act, a new lawsuit alleges.Ryan Shapiro, a national security researcher and Ph.D. candidate at MIT, has been studying the Freedom of Information Act for years with a particular focus on noncompliance by government agencies. He already has multiple FOIA lawsuits in motion against the FBI, and earlier this month he filed a new one.In it, he describes numerous attempts to obtain information over the past two years, and the FBI's frequent response that it can't locate what he's looking for.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Harry Potter fans, take note: Scientists have made an object "disappear" using a cloaking device similar in many ways to the invisibility cloak imagined by author J.K. Rowling.Researchers from the School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science at the Queen Mary University of London worked with U.K. industry recently to demonstrate a device that allows curved surfaces to appear flat to electromagnetic waves. It's not an invisibility cloak just yet, but it could bring the much-yearned-for item closer to reality.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Privacy-minded people have long relied on Tor for anonymity online, but a new system from MIT promises better protection and faster performance.Dubbed Riffle, the new system taps the same onion encryption technique after which Tor is named, but it adds two others as well. First is what's called a mixnet, a series of servers that each permute the order in which messages are received before passing them on to the next server.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Privacy-minded people have long relied on Tor for anonymity online, but a new system from MIT promises better protection and faster performance.Dubbed Riffle, the new system taps the same onion encryption technique after which Tor is named, but it adds two others as well. First is what's called a mixnet, a series of servers that each permute the order in which messages are received before passing them on to the next server.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
An upcoming update to the Salesforce1 mobile app will dramatically reduce the number of supported devices and effectively leave users of all but the latest and most popular devices out in the cold.With its Winter '17 release, due to arrive this October, Salesforce is dropping support for all Android phones except the Samsung Galaxy S5, S6, and S7 along with the Samsung Galaxy Note 4, Google Nexus 5X and Google Nexus 6P.All Android tablets are being dropped as well, with the exception of the Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 and the Samsung Tab A 9.7.Also being excluded are the iPhone 5 and 5C and the iPad Mini 2, Mini 3, and iPad 4, according to an end-of-support announcement uncovered Thursday by The Register.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Much virtual ink gets spilled each week enumerating the many horrors that could be ours in an AI-filled world, but top researchers in the field are already thinking ahead and making plans to ensure none of that happens.In particular, the importance of making artificial intelligence "human-aware" has come to be viewed as a top imperative for the field, earning it special status as an official theme of the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence taking place this week in New York.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Katherine Noyes