a2z Information: 2013-01-27

Saturday, February 2, 2013

U.S. Cyber Command To Recruit 4,000 new Cyber Soldiers

Over the next few years the U.S. Cyber Command, an army of 900 military personnel and civilians who monitor and defend against cyber attacks, is set to grow by 4,000 cyber soldiers. The command will expand its role in national defense by becoming a new kind of fighting force, one that protects the Internet safety of the entire country. As the expansion is implemented, Cybercom will be separated into three teams:

National Mission Forces
Combat Mission Forces
Cyber Protection Forces

Department Of Offense

Two years after arriving in iOS devices, HBO may be coming to Apple TV. Apple is said to be in talks with Time Warner to bring its HBO Go app to its set-top box, according to a report from Bloomberg on Thursday. It could arrive by sometime around the middle of this year.

HBO Go, which requires a subscription, is only available to users who get HBO from their cable provider, so it’s not a solution for cord cutters to simply pay for a la carte HBO programming separate from cable or satellite. But it’s a boon for HBO subscribers that who want to access the provider’s backlog of content: HBO Go makes every episode of every season of every HBO show available to subscribers.

Gmail users with a Windows Phone: you’ve got some good news. Google will be extending support for Google Sync through July 31, according to a Microsoft blog post. The service allows Gmail to be used on mobile devices through Microsoft’s Exchange ActiveSync (EAS) protocol, enabling support for multiple Gmail calendars and push email on smartphones and tablets. In December, Google said it would drop EAS support by today, Jan. 31.

The support extension is a boon for Microsoft because it without EAS support in Gmail, any Windows Phone users with Gmail accounts would experience a far more limiting experience for mail, calendar events and contact management.

Why is Google even dropping EAS support? For starters, it’s not free: Google — or any company that wants to use Exchange ActiveSync — pays a licensing fee to Microsoft. That’s not the primary reason though, else Google would cease all Sync support. Instead, it will still provide it to Google Apps for Business, Government and Education users.

Employees of IT consulting firm Cognizant have participated in an innovative gifting programme that brought smiles to more than 16,000 students in over 100 schools across India. Called 'Little Gifts,' the programme was carried out under Cognizant's employee-led social initiative, Cognizant Outreach.

As part of the programme, children from schools and orphanages adopted by Outreach, including 500 children from tribal areas in Coimbatore, were asked to name the gift they wished to receive in the New Year. Cognizant employees were then invited to support gifts of their choice using an online application. Well over 8,000 Cognizant employees participated in the campaign. Subsequently, the gifts on the children's wish-list were procured and given to the children.

Microsoft on Thursday launched Modern.ie, a set of free tools and services designed to facilitate writing better code across a variety of operating systems, browsers, and devices. But it's also an effort to keep developers coding for the PC and Windows, with an emphasis on Internet Explorer.

Cisco has released findings from two global studies that provide a vivid picture of the rising security challenges that businesses, IT departments and individuals face, particularly as employees become more mobile in blending work and personal lifestyles throughout their waking hours.

Despite popular assumptions that security risks increase as a person's online activity becomes shadier, findings from Cisco's 2013 Annual Security Report (ASR) reveal that the highest concentration of online security threats do not target pornography, pharmaceutical or gambling sites as much as they do legitimate destinations visited by mass audiences, such as major search engines, retail sites and social media outlets. In fact, Cisco found that online shopping sites are 21 times as likely, and search engines are 27 times as likely, to deliver malicious content than a counterfeit software site. Viewing online advertisements? Advertisements are 182 as times likely to deliver malicious content than pornography.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has disclosed that his social networking giant's relationship with Google 'isn't one where the companies really talk'.

While answering a question about Facebook's integration with iOS 6, Zuckerberg said the firms 'are able to do a bunch of things because they have an open platform.'

Apple is said to be working on a new app that lets you use nearby strangers as mobile ATMs.

According to a report, the idea for what Apple calls an 'ad-hoc cash-dispensing network', is that you launch the app and tap in how much you need.

The software uses your location details and broadcasts your request so that everyone else with the app in the vicinity is notified of your predicament.

Ten Indian-American school students have made it to the 40 finalists of the prestigious Intel Science Talent Search for the year 2013.

These 40 students were selected from 300 semifinalists and more than 1,700 entrants to compete in Washington, DC from March 7-13 for $630,000 in awards, with the top winner receiving $100,000 from the Intel Foundation.

Facebook is a mobile company, but stop asking Mark Zuckerberg about the phone thing already.

On its fourth-quarter earnings call on Wednesday, the Facebook CEO and founder may have said the word 'mobile' 1.59 billion times, but that legendary Facebook phone is just a fairy tale. 'People keep on asking if we're going to build a phone,' said Zuckerberg. 'We're not going to build a phone.'

Mobile Is Just Starting To Make Money

Word has been all around, but there was no official confirmation about the mysterious X-Phone that Google's Motorola unit is developing. Until now. A job listing on professional networking website LinkedIn by Motorola shows that the company is looking to fill the post of senior director for product management for X-Phone.

The listing has been taken down now, but a similar vacancy has been posted on Motorola's official job board, this time without the name X-Phone. It is widely expected that the company will unveil this mystery device at the upcoming Google I/O 2013 in June.

Amazon.com stumbled for a short time on Thursday with aspiring visitors tripped in their efforts to reach the online retail titan's main shopping website.

"The gateway page of Amazon.com was offline to some customers for approximately 49 minutes," a spokesman for the Seattle, Washington-based company said in response to an AFP inquiry.

"Other pages of the site were accessible and AWS was not impacted."

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg plans to grow headcount in 2013

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the company expects to grow its headcount in 2013 as it invests in new products. Zuckerberg said the world's No.1 social network will be focussed on building the business for the long-term and will not be operating to maximise profit in 2013.

The company also doubled its mobile advertising revenue in the fourth quarter, a sign that the No.1 social network is seeing early success in expanding onto handheld devices as more of its users migrate to smartphones and tablets.

Today the developers at Imangi Studios have announced that they’ve reached the 50 million app download mark for mobile devices, reaching this point a full 22 days earlier than the previous record holder. That previous record holder was Angry Birds Space, having crowned itself the fastest growing mobile game in April of 2012 by reaching 50 million downloads in 35 days. This of course means that Imangi Studios will be picking up the tab tonight when we all go out to celebrate their victory.

Sarepta Therapeutics Inc became the second company in as many days to see its shares plunge as a result of a Twitter hoax on Wednesday after a user posed as an influential short-seller and alleged improprieties at the biopharmaceutical company.

Sarepta Therapeutics shares plummeted 9.9 percent in a matter of seconds after someone with the Twitter user name @citreonresearc alleged improprieties at the company.

For the past four months, Chinese hackers have persistently attacked The New York Times, infiltrating its computer systems and getting passwords for its reporters and other employees.

After surreptitiously tracking the intruders to study their movements and help erect better defenses to block them, The Times and computer security experts have expelled the attackers and kept them from breaking back in.

A piece of legislation that permits US agencies to snoop on foreign nationals by hacking into cloud servers of Google and Apple, has sent alarm bells ringing among privacy campaigners, a British media report says.

The renewal of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), would grant the US government the right to spy on anyone using the internet storage facilities provided by Google and Apple.

Google launched a global science fair by inviting students around the world to present ideas that could change the world and perhaps become the next Ada Lovelace.

Lovelace was a teenager in the early 1800s when she became fascinated with math and went on to write what is considered to be the first computer program.

"Many great scientists developed their curiosity for science at an early age and went on to make groundbreaking discoveries that changed the way we live," Sam Peter of Google's science fair team said in a blog post.

The process to select five students to tour Silicon Valley in March and meet IT wizards like the founders of Facebook and Google, as promised by Kerala Chief Minister Ooomen Chandy, has begun.

The students-- schools, Engineering and arts colleges, who wish to participate in the selection process will have to upload their innovative ideas on the Youtube -- and five of them would be selected to make the trip to Silicon Valley, the cradle of tech revolution in Northern California of the US.

The proposed immigration reforms by the US senators are low on anti-business immigration rhetoric which is an encouraging sign for Indian IT companies, CLSA said in a report.

"Recent proposals by US senators on immigration suggest that the debate on this front is taking a more reformist and accommodative stance moving away from the anti-business immigration rhetoric which dominated the US immigration discourse through 2011-12," the report noted, adding that while the proposed bills are unlikely to become reality anytime soon, the direction of immigration legislation is encouraging for Indian IT companies which have been impacted adversely by the procedural ( high visa rejection rates) as well as legislative (higher visa fees) measures over the last few years.

The Income tax (I-T) department probing the Nokia tax-evasion case has, in an interim report, said the company should pay Rs 13,000 crore for tax and transfer-pricing violations.

A senior Income-tax official, who requested anonymity, told ET, "We have submitted a 150-page interim report to our office in Delhi," he noted. "Nokia will have to pay Rs 13,000 crore before March 31." Of the Rs 13,000 crore, Rs 3,000 crore is for tax violations and Rs 10,000 crore for transfer pricing issues, the source said. Over the past few weeks, officials from Nokia and audit firm Price Water and Company, the Indian arm of Pricewaterhouse-Coopers, were being questioned in Chennai.

Intel, the world's biggest chipmaker, opened a new front on Thursday in a long and stuttering campaign to get its processors into mobile phones, although it appears to still have a long way to go.

It joined PC maker Acer in Bangkok to unveil the Liquid C1 smartphone, a $330 device running Google's Android operating system, which will be launched first in Thailand and then rolled out across Southeast Asia, one of the fastest-growing markets for mobile phones.

Lenovo eyes emerging markets in smartphone push

Lenovo is stepping up its overseas expansion in the smartphone business after enjoying solid growth at home in China, as the world's No.2 maker of personal computers seeks to offset slowing growth in the traditional PC sector.

Lenovo, also the second-biggest smartphone vendor in China, has begun selling smartphones in countries including Russia, Indonesia, the Philippines and Vietnam, although analysts said it faced stiff competition from major players like Samsung Electronics and Apple.

Fresh from unveiling detailed online maps of North Korea, Google touted studies showing that internet age navigation tools boost the economic engines of nations.

The global "geospatial industry" brings in $270 billion in annual revenue and companies in the sector pay more than $90 billion in wages each year, according to a report by economic consulting firm Oxera.

Firms working with global satellite positioning, digital maps and navigation systems are a "promising engine for economic activity now" and will grow by 30 percent annually, according to Oxera.

Dell's founder and chief executive may pay as much as $1 billion out of his personal fortune to assume control of the world's No. 3 PC maker in a leveraged buyout, Bloomberg News reported citing people familiar with the matter.

Michael Dell may contribute equity financing of $500 million to $1 billion in addition to his approximately 16 percent stake in Dell, worth about $3.6 billion, to push his ownership above 50 percent and have majority control, Bloomberg said.

Spice Mobile has launched its latest smartphone, Stellar Pinnacle - Mi-530, with a 5.3-inch screen. The new dual-sim phone is powered by Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) and can be upgraded to Android 4.1 (Jelly Bean). The company is retailing the device for Rs 13,999 in the Indian market.

Apart from the screen, another unique feature of the device is its front camera with 5MP sensor. This autofocus camera may help the company attract users who frequently update their profiles on social media websites like Facebook and Twitter with new photos. On the rear of the phone is another 8MP autofocus camera.

Increased adoption of cloud-based computing is expected to impact the way security is consumed as well as how key government agencies will prioritise security of public cloud infrastructures, according to research firm Gartner. The growing importance of public clouds, along with the ever-persistent threat on private and public sectors' infrastructures, is expected to result in governments declaring them a critical national infrastructure, said a release.

Research In Motion unveiled a long-delayed line of smartphones which it says will put the company on the comeback trail in a market it once dominated, promising its BlackBerry 10 devices will wow consumers and businesses alike when they finally hit stores.

Also Read: Analysts' views on BlackBerry 10

Signaling his hopes for a fresh start for the company that pioneered on-your-hip email, Chief Executive Thorsten Heins said RIM was abandoning the name it has used since its inception in 1985. From now on, he told tech analysts and other guests, the company will just be known as BlackBerry.

Terming India as a great growth story for it, global computing giant Dell has said it would further expand its operations and headcount in the country, where it has grown from one person to about 27,000-strong workforce in about a decade.

"India has been a great growth story for Dell. We have quite a large presence there and I personally visit the country few times a year. We have a great team there and about 27,000 people," the company's global chief Michael Dell told PTI in an interview here.

YouTube, the video website owned by Google Inc, plans to offer paid subscriptions to some of the content on its site later this year, according to a media report.

YouTube has reached out to several video producers, asking them to submit applications to create for-pay "channels," according to a report in AdAge on Tuesday that cited anonymous sources.

The first such channels could be available to consumers by the second quarter for between $1 a month and $5 a month, AdAge reported.

Business conglomerate Mahindras will consider possible acquisitions in IT space within and outside India after merger of Tech Mahindra and Mahindra Satyam, but only if they bring strategic value on table and not for the purpose of just 'bulking up' the business, a architect of the group's technology strategy Vineet Nayyar has said.

Nayyar, Executive Vice Chairman of Tech Mahindra and Chairman of Mahindra Satyam, also said that the merger of the two companies would have negligible impact on their staff, but a fair amount of positive impact was likely on the business as the combined entity would be seen as a much bigger player in the Indian IT sector.

In a major top-level management restructuring, Bharti Airtel is set to appoint Manoj Kohli as its managing director to revive its mobile business.

Bharti Airtel's founder Sunil Mittal, who is currently its chairman and managing director, will become executive chairman of the company, after Kohli moves to his new role.

Kohli currently heads the firm's international operations as its chief executive officer and is also a joint managing director of the company. A company veteran, he is currently based in Nairobi, the headquarters of Bharti Airtel's African operations.

VMware to cut 7 percent jobs

Software maker VMware plans to cut about 7 per cent of its workforce as part of a restructuring, and it gave a cautious outlook for 2013 due to a decline in US federal government spending and the likelihood of more tough economic times in Europe.

The company's shares fell 14.6 per cent in after-hours trading.

VMware Chief Executive Pat Gelsinger said on a call with analysts on Monday that the company would focus on its most popular products and would scale back in some areas of the business while putting more emphasis on certain geographies, product groups and operations.

Online shopping in India has hit a tipping point and is expected to see exponential growth in 2013, says Google India. The search giant combined consumer interest observed on Google search and online research conducted by TNS to come out on a new report on online shopping in India. The report says online shopping in India saw 128% growth in interest from the consumers in the year 2011 to 2012, compared to only 40% in 2010 to 2011.

Merely good cameras and accessories won't help you get the photograph of your dreams. What is often overlooked is the last mile: the printer. The printed photo is what gives the final expression and life to a photographer's creative visualization and intents. The painstaking efforts put in by the artiste might just come to naught if the printer isn't up to the mark.

Ironically, printing is the only segment in the entire process where the photographer usually doesn't have complete control over the product he or she is creating. During the shoot, she would get the angle, light, composition, aperture, shutter speed etc right. And later, she would fine-tune the raw image digitally on an editing software.

In an exclusive interview with ET Now, Suresh Senapaty, Chief Financial Officer, Wipro, gives his sense of the company's acquisition and growth plans. Excerpts:

ET Now: Please give us a sense on your acquisition plans.

Suresh Senapaty: We have been very active so far as acquisitions are concerned. We continue to be active. There is an independent department working on it and our objective for acquisition is not aggregation, but to clearly fill in the gaps either. It is for addressing some geographies, addressing some practices where we do not have a critical mass. So, supplementation to our organic growth is clearly our motto and from that point of view, clearly we are looking at investing in technology, new geographies and also momentum verticals.

Apple has released a software update for iPhones and iPads that speeds up data downloads on some major overseas telecom networks and a handful of small US carriers.

Apple says iOS version 6.1 adds the ability to access the "LTE" networks of 36 additional iPhone carriers. Those include Alaska Communications, Bluegrass Cellular of Kentucky and C Spire of Mississippi. Internationally, they include major carriers in Italy, Denmark, Finland, Croatia, Portugal, Saudi Arabia and South Africa.

Chief of Yahoo Marissa Mayer lifts sales, and spirits for the first time in 5 years

Marissa Mayer, just by being Marissa Mayer, has done more to move Yahoo forward in her first six months as chief executive than any of her five predecessors did over as many years.

An accomplished engineer and executive, Mayer joined Yahoo from Google as a Silicon Valley celebrity. Since then, just her presence at the company's Sunnyvale,California, headquarters seems to have jolted Yahoo back to life. On Monday, Yahoo reported a good quarter, increasing revenue for the first time in four years and beating Wall Street expectations by 30 per cent.

If you are thinking of looking for a job this year, or are already searching for one, be warned: for some job seekers, the rules have changed. Technology and social media have altered the way some employers consider candidates. Simply sifting through job postings and sending out applications en masse was never a good route to success, and is even less so now.

One of the most important questions that many job seekers can ask these days is this: How searchable am I? Some employers aren't even bothering to post jobs, but are instead searching online for the right candidate, said Barbara Safani, owner of Career Solvers, a career management firm in New York.

IBM Connections, IBM s smarter connections for social business

If Facebook delights you, Twitter excites, YouTube entices and LinkedIn energises you, what would you call something that offers you the specs of all four and has additional blandishments to boot? Well, IBM Connections.

"Social business is getting smarter," says Alistair Rennie, GM (social business), IBM. All big companies are going social, he insists. In fact, he says, 60 per cent of Fortune 100 companies are now on a social platform. The path-breaking offering from IBM is the showpiece of the five-day Connect2013 that opened here on Monday.

Diagnosing the health of a software company, once an uncomplicated exercise, is confounding analysts who are struggling to come to terms with the growing irrelevance of time-tested metrics.

The difficulty in understanding the vital statistics of a software company is reflective of the change-technological as well as operational-that is underway in the offshore outsourcing industry.

The maker of the BlackBerry smartphone is promising a speedier device, a superb typing experience and the ability to keep work and personal identities separate on the same phone. It's the fruit of a crucial, long-overdue makeover for the Canadian company.

Thorsten Heins, chief executive of Research In Motion Ltd, will show off the first phone with the new BlackBerry 10 system in New York on Wednesday. A marketing campaign that includes a Super Bowl ad will accompany the long-anticipated debut. Repeated delays have left the once-pioneering BlackBerry an afterthought in the shadow of Apple's trend-setting iPhone and Google's Android-driven devices.

WhatsApp, one of the most popular apps in the world, contravenes international privacy laws because it forces users to provide access to their entire address book, Canadian and Dutch data protection authorities said.

WhatsApp, which ranks as one of the world's top five best-selling apps, is an instant-messaging application for smartphones including Apple's iPhone and Research in Motion's Blackberry.

How open online courses revolutionising education

Lord knows there's a lot of bad news in the world today to get you down, but there is one big thing happening that leaves me incredibly hopeful about the future, and that is the budding revolution in global online higher education.

Nothing has more potential to lift more people out of poverty - by providing them an affordable education to get a job or improve in the job they have. Nothing has more potential to unlock a billion more brains to solve the world's biggest problems. And nothing has more potential to enable us to reimagine higher education than the massive open online course, or MOOC, platforms that are being developed by the likes of Stanford and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and companies like Coursera and Udacity.

The Pentagon plans to assign significantly more personnel in coming years to counter increasing threats against US government computer networks and conduct offensive operations against foreign foes, a US defense official said on Sunday.

The plan, which would increase both military and civilian staffing at US Cyber Command, comes as the Pentagon moves toward elevating the new command and putting it on the same level as the major combatant commands.

nt production problems with the 2012 iMac have largely been solved, suggesting that supply constraints may ease, according to a report from China Times, summarized by BrightWire.- The company's Taiwanese component suppliers noted that the assembling conformity rate for the new iMac has been improved and mass production started in December 2012. Sales of the device may be boosted in 1Q 2013. - As new products will usually see orders peak within the first four months after they are

BlackBerry maker Research in Motion begins its comeback bid on Wednesday with a new platform launch in a make-or-break move for a firm that is rapidly sinking in the smartphone market it once dominated.
The Canada-based company unveils its BlackBerry 10 operating system and handsets in what some see as its last, best chance to remain a major player in an already competitive sector that is nevertheless attracting new entrants.

Internet search giant Google faces a legal battle in the UK over privacy concerns for allegedly tracking Apple users. As many as 10 million iPhone owners in the country reportedly have ground to file a lawsuit against the world's biggest search engine for bypassing the security settings of Apple's Safari browser in iPhone, iPad and desktop computers in order to track their web activity.

Argentine Martin Parlato has created a website so that netizens can help make other people's dreams come true, a project he began in honour of his father who died when he was a child.

The US-registered site Posibl.com, which went online last November and has already helped several youngsters fulfill their dreams, began out of "personal necessity", Parlato told EFE.

n today's cyber world, where most of your personal information is online, it's easy for fraudsters to steal and misuse it. Here's a look at the way they can trick you and what you can do to protect yourself.

How your identity can be stolen?

SHOULDER SURFING

As the name suggests, it's simply someone looking over your shoulder or using a mobile phone to click a photo while you are using your credit card, keying in your PIN at an ATM, filling up important information in a form or cheque, or just typing your password.

ernet was a person, it would be beginning to feel its age this year as it gets into its 30s, with a mid-life crisis looming. As it happens, the internet has never looked better: it's faster, bigger, better and richer than it was in its 20s.
But there are people having a midlife crisis on the internet's behalf. Governments want to change how it is governed, how it works and, most disturbingly, its openness. So, it is worth taking a moment to outline the first principles of the internet that have made it successful, why they are worth preserving and what we can expect if they are preserved.

Right here at the start of the week we’re seeing a new iteration of the iPad 4 (the first 9.7-inch iPad with a Lightning port) with a newly massive amount of internal storage. While the original largest amount of storage space you’d have been able to get in the iPad was 64GB, the newest version would be 128GB, more storage than you could possibly ever need in your Apple mobile device. The first whisper of this device was found deeply embedded in the heart of a Built Manifest of iOS 6 where only one man, iNeal, was able to find it.

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Saturday, February 2, 2013

Department Of Offense

Mobile Is Just Starting To Make Money

Friday, February 1, 2013

Thursday, January 31, 2013

Wednesday, January 30, 2013

Tuesday, January 29, 2013