49199629
submission
rtfa-troll writes:
The story from yesterday about Google searches has turned into a warning about how work place surveillance could harm you. It turns out that Michele Catalano's husband's boss tipped off the police after finding "suspicious" searches including "pressure cooker bombs" in his old work computer's search history. Luckily for the Catalanos, who even allowed a search of their house when they probably didn't have to, it seems professional and friendly policemen supported by the FBI were called in and instead of them getting killed in a SWAT raid Catalano was merely talked to politely by some men in black cars who even mentioned to Catalano that 99 times out of 100 these tip-offs come to nothing. Perhaps a lesson to be a bit more careful about your privacy so that what you do on the internet remains between you and the professionals in the NSA in future? Best to use tor so that you can be sure they are the only ones listening in. Maybe also a good tip for what to look for if you want to get revenge on former team members who leave you with a pile of bad code?
45291621
submission
rtfa-troll writes:
Microsoft Office slideware for iOS and Android has been resisting many migrations to Google Apps. Although a number of the largest companies, from KLM to Disney have already moved to Google Apps, most large companies are still using MS office heavily and the majority of current Google users are smaller businesses. Now Microsoft has been forced to admit that its office suite for Android will be delayed by at least a year and Zdnet tells us that Google will be the big winner from that, however they say that QuickOffice rather than Google apps will be the main winner. Other Android app suites will benefit too, though currently The Android version of LibreOffice is only available as a dev build for sideloading and is having some difficulties packaging for Google play so may not benefit from this delay unless some more volunteers step up to help. Microsoft relies heavily on office for revenue so this may represent a real long term threat to the company.
43515603
submission
rtfa-troll writes:
There has been worldwide (all locations) total outage of storage in Microsoft's Azure cloud. Apparently "Microsoft unwittingly let an online security certificate expire Friday, triggering a worldwide outage in an online service that stores data for a wide range of business customers." according to the San Francisco Chronicle (also Yahoo and the Register). Perhaps too much time has been spent sucking up to storage vendros and not enough looking after the customers? This comes directly after a week long outage of one of Microsoft's SQL server components in Azure. This is not the first time that we have discussed major outages on Azure and probably won't be the last. It's certainly also not the first time that we have discussed Microsoft cloud systems making user's data unavailable.
42617209
submission
rtfa-troll writes:
The Register tells us that Microsoft has begun squabbling with PC manufacturers over the reasons behind the failure of Windows 8. Microsoft is "frustrated with major OEMs who didn't build nearly enough touch systems". PC manufacturers have hit back saying that they "would have been saddled with the costs of a huge piles of unsold units" claiming that customers actually avoided higher end touch products which were available and instead bought lower end cheaper laptops whilst "Microsoft is not blaming itself for" the failure of it's own touch device, surface RT. The PC manufacturer's claims that touch is the problem seem to be backed by reviews, and some educational rants from users and opinion from user interface design experts, however Microsoft sees this differently . Microsoft is planning to strike back at the PC vendors in February with Surface pro; with a shorter battery life and much heavier than a normal tablet, this is being seen as a direct competitor to traditional laptops. By using it's desktop operating system franchise as a lever Microsoft will be able to enter the lower specification end of the Laptop market with a cost advantage which make make life difficult for former partners such as HP and Dell.
We've discussed previously how some PC manufactures such as Dell have failed in generational change whilst others have diversified to survive market chainges; Samsung with Android and the (still) bestselling Chromebook. ASUS with their successful Nexus tablets. We also discussed the ergonomic problems which are claimed to make touch screens unsuitable for PC use.
41711247
submission
rtfa-troll writes:
Amazon's latest table of the top selling laptops will be a surprise for many on Slashdot who's first reaction when we discussed this before was "so what" with pundits describing it as "an enterprise contender". Given the recent launch and huge advertising campaign, you would expect that the top selling consumer laptop would be based in Win8. If you read recent discussions about Microsoft's troubled new system you might expect a Mac to be leading but Google's Chromebook topping the sales chart on a consumer site without any major advertising campaign is a major surprise. We've discussed before that apart from it's web based ChromeOS Chromebooks are also very fast running Ubuntu Linux and have several other distributions already ported.
40269767
submission
rtfa-troll writes:
The Guardian reports that News Corporation may face FCPA investigations after an "official of the British ministry of defence" was charged "for allegedly receiving £100,000 from Murdoch's tabloid newspapers". News corporation, headed by Rupert Murdock, is loved by most of the readers of Slashdot as the owner of Fox News and as the company which put the overly complicated paywall on the Wall Street Journal. The article states that the charges "would be hard for the Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission to ignore and would warrant investigation under the US Foreign Corrupt Practices Act which could lead to risks for "27 TV licences within the Fox network" .
39435191
submission
rtfa-troll writes:
The collapse of the PC market has had much discussion on Slashdot with a common opinion that, now that Apple is the largest personal computer manufacturer, a loss of sales combined with Apple's iPad will completely eliminate most of them. Now Asustek's most recent results show that there may be a way out for those that can move away from their standard markets. Concentrating on Android tablet devices, the Google Nexus 7, with a help from ASUS transformer tablets has driven the company to massive $230 million profits. Asus gross revenue also climbed 9 percent to around $3.8 billion.
We have discussed related issues recently: Where companies like HTC have lost their focus on open Android devices and suffered from devastating collapses, ASUS has managed to differentiate it's tablets by providing the most open tablet experience possible via with Google's Nexus program and branding.
33562629
submission
rtfa-troll writes:
'GPL enforcement by Software Freedom Conservancy puts electronics makers on notice, leaves business users untouched', says Infoworld, going on to explain 'You are several orders of magnitude more likely to be raided by your proprietary suppliers, in the form of the Business Software Alliance, than to ever hear from SFC, let alone face any action. License compliance is a major and costly issue for proprietary software, but the case concerns an end-user license agreement (EULA), not a source license.' the expertly written article gives a good summary of why having GPL licenses enforced helps everybody except for 'hardware manufacturers — typically those creating low-cost consumer and business electronics' who need to verify that they pass on the same rights to others as they received with the original code.
32312853
submission
rtfa-troll writes:
Tomi Ahonen reports that Samsung has become the largest manufacturer of smartphones (overtaking Apple) and of mobile phones (overtaking Nokia). During the first quarter of 2012 Samsung sold 93.5 million phones with 44.5 million (48%) of those smartphones. Apple would still lead on "smart mobile devices" with 52 million sales including iPads but not iPods. The last time the lead in mobile phone changed was in 14 years ago, in 1998, when Nokia overtook Ericsson. Ericsson never recovered and began leaving the mobile phone market three years later creating Sony Ericsson, later Sony Mobile. It looks like the mobile phone market is going to be brutal with Apple and Samsung crushing everybody else except possibly HTC which is still rising and Motorola (which has Google to look after it).
23583582
submission
rtfa-troll writes:
Bruce Schneier has a good article explaining how the Guardian released the encryption key for the Wikileaks cables and destroyed the main protection against release of informer's personal information. The comments in Schneier's blog fill in details of how exactly Wikileaks secondary file security protections were also bypassed. Now the Guardian has an article that Assange risks arrest by Australia over the latest leaks which include information about an Australian intelligence officer. they even say "We deplore the decision of WikiLeaks to publish the unredacted state department cables, which may put sources at risk," and go on to state that "The decision to publish by Julian Assange was his, and his alone.", something which seems clearly debunked in the analysis on Schneier's blog.
23524126
submission
rtfa-troll writes:
A picture of vodka fountains, indefinite Jaegermiester and sexual harassment is emerging from Microsoft. The former second in command at Microsoft UK was accused of sexual misconduct involving at least five separate women. A Microsoft internal investigation was unable to prove the allegations but decided to fire Simon Negus for having "behaved dishonestly, and thereby acted in a manner calculated or likely to destroy trust and confidence between him and Microsoft" and sue him £75k. Now Negus, who already as a new job as COO at Upstream Systems has struck back with a £10 million false dismissal suit alleging a culture of drunken parties and claiming that other (Male) management at Microsoft were so drunk they followed a female Microsoft UK manager into the ladies’ lavatories. I guess we can now guess why senior managers go away to Microsoft vowing never to buy anything and come back with signed contracts; presumably it was just lying there next to them in the morning and they were too afraid to ask what happened.
22012062
submission
rtfa-troll writes:
Microsoft is preparing it's customers for plenty of outage time according to the Register, with a scheme for office 365 which will give customers some money back. The offer seems to be Microsoft's answer to Google offering a '100% uptime guarantee' (they even pay for maintenance time) The most interesting thing about the scheme is that you can have a one and a half day outage every month (or is that 18 solid days a year???) and still expect to pay half price. I wonder Microsoft have put the Sidekick management in charge of their customer's data.
Looking forward my expense forms have getting eaten by the cloud so I have to fill them in again.
17734810
submission
rtfa-troll writes:
Even with the pre-Christmas buying rush, the Register writes that Microsoft is already desperately offering a new buy one get one free offers similar to the ones they gave for the KIN.. According to the register article, "Windows Phone 7 devices can't even manage two per cent of the fortnight's sales.". These aren't official Microsoft figures, they come from online shopping sites, but since Microsoft official sales figures seem subject to manipulation (also discussed on /.) this is may be one of the better guesses we will get at the success of Windows 7 until well into next year. Also this strongly backs up other reports of deeply disappointing phone sales. Even Microsoft supporters have been wondering for a while whether it's time for Ballmer to go? If the sales reports are true then it looks like he may be pushed before he jumps.
13462998
submission
rtfa-troll writes:
Beef TACO is a Firefox extension which allows a mass opt out from tracking and targeted advertising by many ad networks. The Register reports that the original system TACO has become proprietary and has added new "features" best described as bloatware. I guess this should serve as a warning for users to always prefer software under a copyleft license where possible and best if any company involved has handed it over to a foundation such as the FSF or KDE e.V or Apache foundation which will guarantee that future releases will maintain their F/OSS character. If Google had chosen a license with better protection, such as the GPL, when they released their opt out tool this problem would have been much less likely. This also shows why forks are so important when software development begins to get messy.
