The European Commission has signed a landmark agreement with the U.S. in its quest to legitimize the transatlantic flow of European Union citizens' personal information.No, it's not the embattled Privacy Shield, which the Commission hopes to conclude later this month, but the rather flimsier-sounding umbrella agreement or, more formally, the U.S.-EU agreement "on the protection of personal information relating to the prevention, investigation, detection, and prosecution of criminal offenses."It covers the exchange between EU and U.S. law enforcers, during the course of their investigations of personal data including names, addresses and criminal records. U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch, European Commissioner for Justice Vĕra Jourová and Dutch Minister for Security and Justice Ard van der Steur signed the agreement in Amsterdam on Thursday.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Salesforce.com is moving beyond CRM and into e-commerce with the acquisition of cloud service provider Demandware.It will use the purchase to kick-start a new field of business, the Salesforce Commerce Cloud, it said Wednesday.The company already has its Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Analytics Cloud.By rebranding Demandware Commerce Cloud as its own, Salesforce will be able to combine e-commerce, order management, point-of-sale, store operations and predictive intelligence into its own platform.Commerce Cloud will allow Salesforce customers to connect with their own clients in new ways, the company said, while Demandware customers will gain access to sales, marketing and analytics functions from Salesforce. Demandware customers include L’Oreal and U.K. retail chain Marks & Spencer.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Thousands of companies were turned into lawbreakers at a stroke the last time the High Court of Ireland referred a question about data protection to the Court of Justice of the European Union. And it may be about to do it again.That means yet more uncertainty for companies processing European citizens' personal information in the U.S., as they struggle to keep up with the changes in privacy regulations triggered by the CJEU's response to the Irish court's last question.Under EU law, citizens' personal information can only be exported to jurisdictions guaranteeing a similar level of privacy protection to that required by the 1995 Data Protection Directive.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Down, but not out: Microsoft is laying off another 1,850 staff from its smartphone hardware business, but says it isn't leaving the market completely.What's left of the old Nokia business in Finland will be hardest hit by the latest round of lay-offs, with up to 1,350 jobs to go. Microsoft will cut up to 500 more globally, it said Wednesday.Since it bought Nokia's mobile phone activities in 2013, Microsoft has been managing a business in decline. The majority of the staff it acquired from Nokia are gone, and the company's mobile phone market share has stagnated.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
French police have raided Google's Paris office as part of an investigation into the company's tax affairs.The raid began at 5 a.m. Tuesday, Paris time, according to local newspaper Le Parisien, and involved five public prosecutors, 25 computer experts, and investigators from the French tax office and the Central Office for the Prevention of Corruption and Financial and Tax Crimes (OCLCIFF), the public prosecutors' office told local media.French prosecutors began investigating Google's finances last June, following allegations from the tax authorities that the company was involved in serious tax fraud.Google channels much of its European advertising sales through its Irish subsidiary, Google Ireland, profiting from low tax rates there. Tax officials in other European countries are concerned about the resulting loss in tax revenue.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Financial transaction network SWIFT called on its customers Friday to help it end a string of high-profile banking frauds perpetrated using its network.The SWIFT network itself is still secure, it insisted in a letter to banks and financial institutions. However, some of its customers have suffered security breaches in their own infrastructure, allowing attackers to fraudulently authorize transactions and send them over the SWIFT network, it said.That's the best explanation so far for how authenticated instructions were sent from Bangladesh Bank to the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank of New York over the SWIFT network, ordering the transfer of almost US$1 billion. The Fed transferred around $101 million of that before identifying an anomaly in one of the instructions. Only $20 million of that has so far been recovered.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Financial transaction network SWIFT called on its customers Friday to help it end a string of high-profile banking frauds perpetrated using its network.The SWIFT network itself is still secure, it insisted in a letter to banks and financial institutions. However, some of its customers have suffered security breaches in their own infrastructure, allowing attackers to fraudulently authorize transactions and send them over the SWIFT network, it said.That's the best explanation so far for how authenticated instructions were sent from Bangladesh Bank to the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank of New York over the SWIFT network, ordering the transfer of almost US$1 billion. The Fed transferred around $101 million of that before identifying an anomaly in one of the instructions. Only $20 million of that has so far been recovered.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Cloud28+, the cloud services federation backed by Hewlett Packard Enterprise, now wants to help you install enterprise applications, not just choose them from its catalog.
Although HPE is the driving force behind Cloud28+, the federation of independent software vendors, resellers and service providers now has 225 members, which are pushing to simplify cloud software deployment.
The federation plans to open its new App Center for business later this summer, and will begin stocking its virtual shelves on June 7 with the opening of an App Onboarding Center. This will containerize workloads submitted by vendors and resellers and test them for compatibility, initially for free.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Nokia is back in the mobile phone business, after a fashion.It has granted HMD Global an exclusive, 10-year license to the famous brand, allowing the Finnish startup to sell Nokia mobile phones and tablets.Meanwhile Microsoft, which bought Nokia's mobile phone activities in 2013, is finally getting out of the feature-phone business, selling its remaining interests in the Nokia brand and its Vietnamese phone factory to HMD and to FIH, a subsidiary of contract manufacturing giant Foxconn, for around US$350 million.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
ARM has acquired Apical, a U.K. designer of embedded computer vision technology, and plans to incorporate that technology into future ARM microprocessor and system-on-chip designs, it said Wednesday.The move will open up new opportunities for designers of autonomous vehicles and security systems, among other connected things, according to ARM CEO Simon Segars. Computer vision is in its early stages, and Apical is at the forefront of embedding such technology, he said.Apical's technologies is already used in 1.5 billion smartphones, according to ARM, although many of those phones may be using nothing more sophisticated than a display brightness control Apical calls Assertive Display. That technology also turned up in Samsung Electronics' new laptop, the ATIV Book 9.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Firefox now has more desktop users than both Microsoft's web browsers combined -- but it's a rivalry that is increasingly irrelevant as Google Chrome has almost twice the share of Firefox and Microsoft together.The latest figures from Statcounter show that Microsoft Edge and Internet Explorer combined had a 15.5 percent share of worldwide desktop browser usage in April, a decline from 15.8 percent in March.The effect of Microsoft's new Edge browser is, it seems, marginal, with Windows 10 users apparently preferring other browsers.The boost to Microsoft's overall browser share that it might have expected from the launch of the Windows 10 with Edge hasn't happened yet, Statcounter said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Bangladesh Bank, a commercial bank in Vietnam and ... Sony Pictures are the unlikely bedfellows in a tale of cyber intrigue uncovered by security researchers at BAE Systems.Researchers Sergei Shevchenko and Adrian Nish have found some links between malware involved in the 2014 attack on Sony Pictures and attacks on two banks involving the theft of credentials for the SWIFT financial transfer network.The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation said North Korea was to blame for the Sony attack (although security experts are divided on the matter).To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Financial transaction network SWIFT has renewed its warning to customers to be on their guard following the discovery of malware at another bank using its services.The bank first asked customers to take steps to secure their systems in the wake of an attempt to steal US$951 million from Bangladesh Bank in February. Attackers there appear to have used custom malware installed on computers at the bank to send fraudulent messages over the SWIFT network seeking to transfer money from the bank's account with the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank of New York.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Financial transaction network SWIFT has renewed its warning to customers to be on their guard following the discovery of malware at another bank using its services.The bank first asked customers to take steps to secure their systems in the wake of an attempt to steal US$951 million from Bangladesh Bank in February. Attackers there appear to have used custom malware installed on computers at the bank to send fraudulent messages over the SWIFT network seeking to transfer money from the bank's account with the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank of New York.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Thread, an open wireless protocol for the Internet of things, is getting a boost from one of its biggest boosters, Google-owned Nest Labs.
An IPv6 networking protocol built on the 802.15.4 mesh networking standard, Thread is designed to connect hundreds of low-power devices to one other and to the cloud.
While the protocol is open, anyone wanting to build Thread-compatible devices had to roll their own software stack implementing it -- until now.
Late Wednesday, Nest published the source code for its implementation of the Thread protocol, OpenThread, on Github under a three-clause BSD license, allowing anyone to reuse, modify or redistribute it in source or binary form.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Thread, an open wireless protocol for the Internet of things, is getting a boost from one of its biggest boosters, Google-owned Nest Labs.
An IPv6 networking protocol built on the 802.15.4 mesh networking standard, Thread is designed to connect hundreds of low-power devices to one other and to the cloud.
While the protocol is open, anyone wanting to build Thread-compatible devices had to roll their own software stack implementing it -- until now.
Late Wednesday, Nest published the source code for its implementation of the Thread protocol, OpenThread, on Github under a three-clause BSD license, allowing anyone to reuse, modify or redistribute it in source or binary form.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Weeks after cancelling two generations of Atom mobile chips, Intel is paving the way for future low-power mobile technologies with a new research collaboration with a French atomic energy lab.Fundamental research leading towards faster wireless networks, secure low-power technologies for the Internet of Things, and even 3D displays will be the focus of Intel's collaboration with the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA).Intel and the CEA already work together in the field of high-performance computing, and a new agreement signed Thursday will see Intel fund work at the CEA's Laboratory for Electronics and Information Technology (LETI) over the next five years, according to Rajeeb Hazra, vice-president of Intel's data center group.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Weeks after cancelling two generations of Atom mobile chips, Intel is paving the way for future low-power mobile technologies with a new research collaboration with a French atomic energy lab.Fundamental research leading towards faster wireless networks, secure low-power technologies for the Internet of Things, and even 3D displays will be the focus of Intel's collaboration with the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA).Intel and the CEA already work together in the field of high-performance computing, and a new agreement signed Thursday will see Intel fund work at the CEA's Laboratory for Electronics and Information Technology (LETI) over the next five years, according to Rajeeb Hazra, vice-president of Intel's data center group.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Technicians from the SWIFT global financial network connecting it to Bangladesh's central bank made it easier for hackers to attack the bank, Bangladeshi police and a bank official have told Reuters.The technicians worked on Bangladesh's Real-time Gross Settlement (RTGS) system, used to transfer money among Bangladeshi banks, three months before hackers attempted to steal US$951 million from the central bank. The work opened up "a lot of loopholes" in bank computer systems, said the head of the criminal investigation department leading the investigation.Bangladeshi police want to interview the SWIFT technicians to find out whether their actions were intentional or negligent, Mohammad Shah Alam told Reuters.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Technicians from the SWIFT global financial network connecting it to Bangladesh's central bank made it easier for hackers to attack the bank, Bangladeshi police and a bank official have told Reuters.The technicians worked on Bangladesh's Real-time Gross Settlement (RTGS) system, used to transfer money among Bangladeshi banks, three months before hackers attempted to steal US$951 million from the central bank. The work opened up "a lot of loopholes" in bank computer systems, said the head of the criminal investigation department leading the investigation.Bangladeshi police want to interview the SWIFT technicians to find out whether their actions were intentional or negligent, Mohammad Shah Alam told Reuters.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Peter Sayer