With so many people shopping online nowadays, they, we, all of use, make a good target for online crime. There are clever people out their that can snoop on provate information, so it is essential that we all take the neccessary precautions. Check out the video below and feel free to leave your comments.
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The National Security Agency created a "secret backdoor" so its massive databases could be searched for the contents of U.S. citizens' confidential phone calls and e-mail messages without a warrant, according to the latest classified documents leaked by Edward Snowden.
A report in the Guardian on Friday quoted Sen. Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat who serves on the Senate Intelligence Committee, as saying the secret rule offers a loophole allowing "warrantless searches for the phone calls or emails of law-abiding Americans..."
Read the full story here... Source: CNET
John Legere, CEO of T-Mobile, had the room with his first F-bomb.
The event was last January's Consumer Electronics Show, and scores of reporters, bloggers, and photographers had come to hear what Legere had to say in one of his first public appearances since his appointment as CEO in September. Expectations weren't high. The audience, gathered in the typical Las Vegas convention center room showered in pink lights, had expected to hear the same "challenger" strategy that his predecessor had put forth the year before...
Read the full story here... Source: CNET
Facebook offered a deep dive into its its News Feed ranking algorithm on Tuesday, expounding on why it moves up old stories and how it picks which stories it thinks you want to see.
Lars Backstrom, the engineering manager in charge of News Feed ranking, explained how Facebook sorts through the "tens of thousands" of potential posts users put on Facebook each day. While there is a median of 1,500 potential stories that a user can see daily, Facebook inserts about 300 based on an algorithm that guesses how interested you will be in a post by factoring users' reactions to previous posts and the users. Each post is given a score and placed depending on that score. The more likes and comments people make, the more data Facebook has to work with...
Read the full story here... Source: CNET
For the first time in more than 20 years, the White House squashed a verdict handed down by a top U.S. trade court, a result of an ongoing patent dispute between Samsung and Apple.
The move came as a surprise to industry watchers, despite coming only a couple of months after the government set up a task force to "protect innovators from frivilous litigation." The Obama administration has long had professional and political links with Apple, the iPhone and iPad maker at the center of the dispute with Samsung over patents crucial to industry standards...
Read the full story here... Source: CNET
Earlier this week, Apple executive Bob Mansfield stepped down from his management duties at Apple in order to focus on 'special projects' -- reportedly working on the development of entirely new products for the company.
Now, 9to5Mac has additional details about how the shake-up affects other executives.
Dan Riccio, who was promoted to lead Apple's hardware engineering teams when Bob Mansfield first retired last year, will gain oversight of the company's antenna design teams in addition to his current leadership of Mac, iPhone, iPad and iPod engineering.
Jeff Williams, who, as Senior Vice President for Operations, has been Tim Cook's right hand man for years, will take over the job of managing Apple's special projects engineering teams, while Mansfield gets to continue working with Apple's newest and most cutting edge designs without the distraction of management.
According to a source familiar with the former Technologies team, there has been a lack of formal internal communication regarding the reasoning behind the management shift. However, the company did make the new executive roles clear to these employees. Even with the lack of communication, sources say that the change is not unprecedented. Over the last couple of months, Mansfield is said to have been increasingly focused on chips (and some aspects of wireless) while delegating his other teams to other executives.
9to5 goes on to note that though Mansfield would like to retire at some point, he will likely never fully leave the company. Given the lengths that Tim Cook went in order to keep Mansfield at Apple, it's likely he will be given free reign to work whatever hours and on whatever projects he wishes.
Source: Mac Rumours
Hours after the Department of Justice and 33 U.S. states proposed a set of remedies for Apple to comply with following its July loss in the e-books price-fixing case, the company came back with its own set of terms and called the government's proposals vague, overreaching, and unwarranted.
In a brief filed Friday, the company called the government's proposed measures a "draconian and punitive intrusion into Apple's business, wildly out of proportion to any adjudicated wrongdoing or potential harm."
Apple maintained that it did not violate antitrust laws, and that an earlier settlement struck with publishers means the behavior that the court found to be anticompetitive has already ended and can't recur.
But if the court does issue an injunction, Apple said, it recommended that it place "reasonable limitations on Apple's ability to share information," prohibit agreements with publishers from having "most favored nation" pricing pacts that give Apple the best price, and "reasonable antitrust training obligations for Apple, lasting a reasonable term."
Earlier Friday, the Department of Justice proposed a remedy that would require Apple to terminate its existing agreements with five major book publishers, staff a court-appointed monitor to keep an eye on internal antitrust compliance policies, and allow competing companies like Amazon to link to purchasable content within their e-book apps.
A plan from either side still requires court approval. The court will hold a hearing on proposed remedies on August 9.
Last April, the Justice Department sued Apple, along with five of the six largest book publishers in the U.S., accusing all parties of conspiring to set e-book prices and break Amazon's hold on the market with its Kindle e-book reader. Apple became the sole defendant in the case after the publishers made deals with the Justice Department.
A federal judge last month ruled that Apple violated antitrust laws, following a trial in the Southern District of New York. Judge Denise Cote said the Justice Department proved that publishers conspired together to eliminate price competition for e-books, and that Apple played a central role in that conspiracy. Apple has said it plans to appeal the decision.
Source: CNET
The U.S. government has demanded that major Internet companies divulge users' stored passwords, according to two industry sources familiar with these orders, which represent an escalation in surveillance techniques that has not previously been disclosed.
If the government is able to determine a person's password, which is typically stored in encrypted form, the credential could be used to log in to an account to peruse confidential correspondence or even impersonate the user. Obtaining it also would aid in deciphering encrypted devices in situations where passwords are reused.
"I've certainly seen them ask for passwords," said one Internet industry source who spoke on condition of anonymity. "We push back."
A second person who has worked at a large Silicon Valley company confirmed that it received legal requests from the federal government for stored passwords. Companies "really heavily scrutinize" these requests, the person said. "There's a lot of 'over my dead body.'"
Some of the government orders demand not only a user's password but also the encryption algorithm and the so-called salt, according to a person familiar with the requests. A salt is a random string of letters or numbers used to make it more difficult to reverse the encryption process and determine the original password. Other orders demand the secret question codes often associated with user accounts...
Read the full story here. Source: CNET
When it comes to its ambitions for television, Google's hoping that the third time's the charm.
This morning the company unveiled Chromecast. Google's latest foray into the television is a low-cost stick that plugs into a HDMI input to let a wide swath of smartphones, tablets, and devices using the Chrome browser seamlessly fling what they're playing onto the TV.
Google argues that it is solving a unique problem, but it really isn't. In fact, a myriad of devices already exist to do just that. But by coming out with a cheaper, more innovative offering, Google fired its loudest shot across the bow of Apple TV and all of the other streaming TV peripherals with the Chromecast. And at $35, it claims to have a winner.
The television is "the most immersive experience in the house," said Sundar Pichai, Google's head of Android, Chrome, and apps at the breakfast unveiling Wednesday in San Francisco. He noted more than 200 billion online videos are watched globally by users every month, and Netflix and YouTube combined represent nearly half of peak downstream Internet traffic in North America.
"It's very difficult to get your online media onto your television in your house," said Pichai.
True enough. It has been difficult, but largely only for Google...
Read the full story here. Source: CNET
When Facebook checks in with Wall Street for its quarterly review on Wednesday, it will hand in results for mobile advertising for just the fourth time and reveal its first full-year report card on revenue from mobile ads.
By most accounts, Facebook is expected to do well on the mobile front and make close to one-third of its advertising revenue from mobile placements, according to analysts' consensus. It would be a remarkable achievement, one that comes just in the nick of time to save Facebook from a decaying desktop business.
From zero to last-minute hero
RBC Capital Markets is particularly bullish on the subject and expects Facebook to pull in $487 million from mobile, which would be good enough for 34 percent of the firm's projected $1.43 billion second-quarter ad revenue estimate. Goldman Sachs holds a more conservative perspective and is predicting that Facebook will make $425 million in mobile ad revenue.
Whatever the number Facebook reports, it will be a marked improvement from the infinitesimal amount that Facebook made from mobile advertising at this time last year. Then, Facebook said it was bringing in $500,000 per day from mobile ads. Now, Facebook's mobile revenue may come in as high as $5.4 million a day, or up 980 percent from the year ago quarter...
Read the full story here. Source: CNET
After news that government officials would be testing the efficiency of iOS 7’s Activation Lock against thieves, San Francisco District Attorney George Gascón has come out in support of the feature, saying that “clear improvements” have been made to stop criminals, according to the San Francisco Examiner.
Last week, Gascón and New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman brought in security experts from the Northern California Regional Intelligence Center to test out Apple’s Activation Lock feature as well as Absolute Software’s Lojack service on the Samsung Galaxy S4 in order to determine how effective they are against thieves.
"I'm very optimistic that they came and were willing to share their technology with us," Gascón said in a statement, also noting that Microsoft and Google had not yet come forth with their plans to combat theft. Gascón did not detail how the specific features work, explaining that they were not yet finished.
Both attorneys called for the tests as a part of the Secure Our Smartphone (S.O.S) program that aims to stop the theft and black market resale of stolen mobile devices. While carriers have already established a database to track stolen phones, it has proven to be largely futile. Prior to these tests, Gascón and Schneiderman called for smartphones to have a kill switch that would disable them in the event of theft.
Announced at WWDC, Activation Lock is set to be included in iOS 7, which is expected to be released to consumers this fall.
Source: Mac Rumours
The claws are out now.
T-Mobile executive Andrew Sherrard fired back at AT&T's new early upgrade plan, calling it a "poor imitation" that actually costs the customers more than they think.
Earlier Tuesday, AT&T introduced its AT&T Next plan, which lets people pay for their mobile devices in 20 monthly installments and allows them to upgrade each year. But the new plan doesn't include a key component -- a lower-cost service plan -- which T-Mobile said is its crucial standout feature in its early upgrade plan, Jump. As a result, T-Mobile claims AT&T Next is actually more expensive than ever.
"They're charging you twice on the same phone and calling that a good deal," Sherrard told CNET on Tuesday.
In addition to paying the full price of the phone over the monthly installments, AT&T Next customers also pay the same service plan rate they had been paying -- a rate that was designed to work with subsidized phones. When T-Mobile introduced its no-contract monthly installment plan, it cut the rate of its plan to reflect the lack of a subsidy.
An AT&T representative told CNET that Next represents a a new offer and different choice for customers.
"We're not taking away anything," he said. "We're just giving people choice by removing the upfront cost and allowing them to upgrade their phone."
AT&T wouldn't discuss the direct comparisons between Next and Jump, but noted that it offers a larger 4G LTE network.
"As people dig into this, they'll find it's a much better deal to go with Jump," T-Mobile's Sherrard said. He added that Jump includes insurance, which AT&T Next does not.
Verizon Wireless is expected to introduce a similar plan to that of AT&T, and Sherrard said he felt equally good about how Jump stacks up against the reported Verizon Edge plan.
Sherrard said he was happy that the industry was reacting to T-Mobile's moves. He called the competitors' moves "a response, not a strategy."
Sherrard said that as the challenger in the industry with the lowest market share among the big four U.S. carriers, T-Mobile can afford to be more aggressive to pursue growth. The big two companies can't follow because they have higher profit margins to protect.
"We're glad to change the game a little bit," he said.
Source: CNET