Peter Sayer
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Cebit showcases security after Snowden
It's almost four years since Edward Snowden leaked U.S. National Security Agency documents revealing the extent of the organization's surveillance of global internet traffic, but he's still making the headlines in Germany.At the Cebit trade show in Hannover, Germany, he'll be looking back at that period in live video interview from Moscow on Tuesday evening.There have been a lot of changes on the internet in those four years, but one of the biggest is the growth in the use of encryption.In 2013, the NSA had free rein and could listen in on almost any communication it wanted. Now, it's commonplace to encrypt traffic to webmail services and even popular websites such as Microsoft.com or Google.com using the https protocol. And you don't have to be an enemy of the state to use an end-to-end encrypted messaging system such as WhatsApp simply to chat with friends.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Cebit showcases security after Snowden
It's almost four years since Edward Snowden leaked U.S. National Security Agency documents revealing the extent of the organization's surveillance of global internet traffic, but he's still making the headlines in Germany.At the Cebit trade show in Hannover, Germany, he'll be looking back at that period in live video interview from Moscow on Tuesday evening.There have been a lot of changes on the internet in those four years, but one of the biggest is the growth in the use of encryption.In 2013, the NSA had free rein and could listen in on almost any communication it wanted. Now, it's commonplace to encrypt traffic to webmail services and even popular websites such as Microsoft.com or Google.com using the https protocol. And you don't have to be an enemy of the state to use an end-to-end encrypted messaging system such as WhatsApp simply to chat with friends.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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BlackBerry readies a more secure version of the Samsung Galaxy S7
Secusmart, the BlackBerry subsidiary that secures the German Chancellor Angela Merkel's smartphone, will roll out a version of its SecuSuite security software compatible with Samsung Electronics' Knox platform later this year.That means that organizations looking for smartphones offering government-grade security will be able to buy the Samsung Galaxy S7 or, soon, the S8 rather than the now-discontinued BlackBerry OS smartphones like the one Merkel uses.In addition to encrypting communications and data stored on the device, the new SecuSuite also secures voice calls using the SNS standard set by Germany's Federal Office for Information Security (BSI). Organizational app traffic is passed through an IPsec VPN, while data from personal apps can go straight to the internet. Encrypted voice calls go through a different gateway, not the VPN.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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BlackBerry readies a more secure version of the Samsung Galaxy S7
Secusmart, the BlackBerry subsidiary that secures the German Chancellor Angela Merkel's smartphone, will roll out a version of its SecuSuite security software compatible with Samsung Electronics' Knox platform later this year.That means that organizations looking for smartphones offering government-grade security will be able to buy the Samsung Galaxy S7 or, soon, the S8 rather than the now-discontinued BlackBerry OS smartphones like the one Merkel uses.In addition to encrypting communications and data stored on the device, the new SecuSuite also secures voice calls using the SNS standard set by Germany's Federal Office for Information Security (BSI). Organizational app traffic is passed through an IPsec VPN, while data from personal apps can go straight to the internet. Encrypted voice calls go through a different gateway, not the VPN.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Social media companies have a month to update service terms in the EU
Facebook, Twitter and Google have been given a month to make changes to their user agreements in the European Union or face "enforcement action."European consumer authorities put the social media services on notice last November that their terms of service did not comply with EU law, asked them to make changes and to address the problem of scams that misled users of the services.The authorities and the European Commission met with the companies on Thursday to discuss their proposed changes, and gave them a month to make their final proposals, the European Commission said Friday. If those proposals don't satisfy the authorities, then they could take enforcement action, the Commission said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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SAP adds new features to Vora and readies a cloud version
SAP has added some new capabilities to SAP Vora, its in-memory distributed computing system based on Apache Spark and Hadoop. Version 1.3 of Vora includes a number of new distributed, in-memory data-processing engines, including ones for time-series data, graph data and schema-less JSON data, that accelerate complex processing. Common uses for the graph engine might be analyzing social graphs or supply chain graphs, said Ken Tsai, SAP's head of product marketing for database and data management. One application that would benefit from the new time-series engine is looking for patterns of electricity consumption in smart metering data.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Twitter accounts hacked, Twitter Counter steps forward as culprit
Twitter Counter, a third-party analytics service, appears once again to have provided a gateway for hackers to post messages to high-profile Twitter accounts.An unlikely number of Twitter users suddenly learned to speak Turkish on Wednesday, posting an inflammatory message in the language replete with Nazi swastikas.Among those posting the message were the Twitter accounts of Forbes magazine, the Atlanta Police Department, and Amnesty International, one of the few hacked accounts one might expect to speak Turkish.Fears that these accounts had all been hacked were quickly allayed, when Twitter identified a third-party app as being to blame.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Twitter accounts hacked, Twitter Counter steps forward as culprit
Twitter Counter, a third-party analytics service, appears once again to have provided a gateway for hackers to post messages to high-profile Twitter accounts.An unlikely number of Twitter users suddenly learned to speak Turkish on Wednesday, posting an inflammatory message in the language replete with Nazi swastikas.Among those posting the message were the Twitter accounts of Forbes magazine, the Atlanta Police Department, and Amnesty International, one of the few hacked accounts one might expect to speak Turkish.Fears that these accounts had all been hacked were quickly allayed, when Twitter identified a third-party app as being to blame.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Texas hospital struggles to make IBM’s Watson cure cancer
If IBM is looking for a new application for its Watson machine learning tools, it might consider putting health care providers' procurement and systems integration woes ahead of curing cancer.After spending more than four years and US$62 million on its Oncology Expert Advisor project, the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center at the University of Texas still looking for answers in all those areas.The fall-out from that project has now prompted the resignation of the cancer center's president, Ronald DePinho, the Wall Street Journal reported Thursday.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Fears of election hacking spread in Europe
France has followed the Netherlands in placing its faith in paper-based voting systems ahead of key elections later this year, following allegations that Russian hackers influenced last year's U.S. presidential election. The French government will not allow internet voting in legislative elections to be held in June because of the "extremely elevated threat of cyberattacks." The move follows a recommendation from the French Network and Information Security Agency (ANSSI), it said Monday. The move will only affect 11 of the 577 electoral districts voting, those representing French citizens living outside their home country. These expatriates had previously been allowed to vote over the internet in some elections because the alternative was to require some of them to travel vast distances to the nearest embassy or consulate with a ballot box.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Fears of election hacking spread in Europe
France has followed the Netherlands in placing its faith in paper-based voting systems ahead of key elections later this year, following allegations that Russian hackers influenced last year's U.S. presidential election. The French government will not allow internet voting in legislative elections to be held in June because of the "extremely elevated threat of cyberattacks." The move follows a recommendation from the French Network and Information Security Agency (ANSSI), it said Monday. The move will only affect 11 of the 577 electoral districts voting, those representing French citizens living outside their home country. These expatriates had previously been allowed to vote over the internet in some elections because the alternative was to require some of them to travel vast distances to the nearest embassy or consulate with a ballot box.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Google faces another antitrust complaint in Europe
Another day, another antitrust action against Google: On Monday, the Open Internet Project filed a new complaint with the European Union's top competition authority, charging the search giant with abusing its dominant position in the market for smartphone software.It was in 2014 that the OIP filed its first complaint against Google, contributing to a European Commission investigation into the company's search services that began in 2010.Since then, the OIP has gained 20 new members from ICOMP, the Initiative for a Competitive Online Marketplace. OIP is now led by the chairmen of French search engine Qwant and Hot-Maps.com, an online mapping company the main activity of which seems to be complaining about Google. Its other members include publishing companies Axel Springer, Hubert Burda Media, TV network ProSiebenSat.1, mapping companies Evermaps and Mappy, stock photo libraries Getty Images and CEPIC, and football's Premier League, among others.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Google faces new antitrust investigation in Turkey
Antitrust concerns about Google's tying of its app store and services to use of the Android OS are spreading, as Turkey's Competition Board has opened an inquiry, reversing an earlier decision.Russian search company Yandex filed a complaint with the board in 2015, alleging that Google requires smartphone manufacturers to pre-load Google Play Store, Google Play Services and Google Mobile Services on any Android devices they sell, and to make Google Search the default search provider on those devices.Such behavior would be a concern for Yandex, which offers app store, mobile mapping and search services of its own.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Relax: This phone measures your blood pressure
This Swiss electronics company is on a mission: to stop millions of people dying of ignorance each year.Worldwide, high blood pressure leads to around 9.4 million deaths annually according to figures from the World Health Organization. And yet, the condition is easily diagnosed and treated. In the Americas, the prevalence of high blood pressure fell from 31 percent in 1980 to 18 percent in 2014, but remains high in developing countries.Before high blood pressure can be controlled, though, it needs to be detected, and that's the part that Leman Micro Devices wants to make simpler. It is showing off its solution at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this week.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Cog Systems offers more secure version of HTC A9 smartphone
It sounds like a smartphone user's worst fear: Software that starts up before the phone's operating system, intercepting and encrypting every byte sent to or from the flash memory or the network interface. This is not some new kind of ransomware, though, this is the D4 Secure Platform from Cog Systems. The product grew out of custom security software the company developed for governments, and which it saw could also be put to use in the enterprise as a way to make smartphones more productive while still maintaining a high level of security. It includes a Type 1 hypervisor, a virtualized VPN and additional storage encryption that wrap the standard Android OS in additional layers of protection largely invisible to the end user.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Cog Systems offers more secure version of HTC A9 smartphone
It sounds like a smartphone user's worst fear: Software that starts up before the phone's operating system, intercepting and encrypting every byte sent to or from the flash memory or the network interface. This is not some new kind of ransomware, though, this is the D4 Secure Platform from Cog Systems. The product grew out of custom security software the company developed for governments, and which it saw could also be put to use in the enterprise as a way to make smartphones more productive while still maintaining a high level of security. It includes a Type 1 hypervisor, a virtualized VPN and additional storage encryption that wrap the standard Android OS in additional layers of protection largely invisible to the end user.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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SAP sets March 30 as launch date for its Cloud Platform SDK for iOS
Almost a year after SAP teamed with Apple to develop business applications for smartphones and tablets, the German enterprise software developer is ready to unveil the first fruits of their partnership.On March 30, it plans to release the first version of SAP Cloud Platform SDK for iOS, a tool to enable businesses to integrate Apple's handheld devices with their back-end information systems. And at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this week it opened enrollment for SAP Academy for iOS, a mix of paid and free training services to help develop apps with that tool.It may have looked as though Apple were retreating from the enterprise when it axed its Xserve rack-mounted server line in 2011, it, but since then it has multiplied its partnerships with enterprise hardware, software and service vendors, most notably IBM in 2014, Cisco Systems in 2015 and, last year, SAP.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Huawei’s P10 camera-phone comes in more colors than the rainbow
Huawei Technologies calls the P10 a smartphone, but its CEO doesn't have much to say about its communication capabilities.Richard Yu, CEO of the company's consumer business group, might instead have been talking about a new camera when he boasted of the device's Leica-style portraiture and, in fact, like its predecessor it was "co-engineered" with camera-maker Leica.The device runs Android 7.0 on a Huawei Kirin 960 processor with four 2.4GHz ARM Cortex A73 cores and four 1.8GHz ARM Cortex A53 cores and has 4GB of RAM and 32, 64 or 128GB of flash depending on the model.It has a 5.1-inch Full-HD screen and a 3,200 mAh battery with USB-C charging. It measures 145.3 millimeters by 69.3 mm by 6.98 mm, and weighs about 145 grams.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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The new BlackBerry has a physical keyboard and will arrive in April
The new BlackBerry KEYone smartphone, unveiled Saturday, is the first smartphone to carry the brand that doesn't come from BlackBerry.It will go on sale globally in April, said Nicolas Zibell, CEO of TCL Communication, the phone's manufacturer and licensee of the brand, at a launch event in Barcelona on the eve of Mobile World Congress.Like the BlackBerries of old, the KEYone has a physical keyboard with raised keys. A neat twist is that it also acts as a touchpad of sorts, and each letter can be used as a shortcut, with or without a modifier key, for 52 shortcuts in all.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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The new BlackBerry has a physical keyboard and will arrive in April
The new BlackBerry KEYone smartphone, unveiled Saturday, is the first smartphone to carry the brand that doesn't come from BlackBerry.It will go on sale globally in April, said Nicolas Zibell, CEO of TCL Communication, the phone's manufacturer and licensee of the brand, at a launch event in Barcelona on the eve of Mobile World Congress.Like the BlackBerries of old, the KEYone has a physical keyboard with raised keys. A neat twist is that it also acts as a touchpad of sorts, and each letter can be used as a shortcut, with a short or long keypress, for 52 shortcuts in all.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here