Google Chrome Celebrates Fourth Anniversary



The popular Web browser surpassed Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE) to become world's most used Web browser for the first time earlier this year.

Thursday, September 06, 2012: Google's Chrome Web browser has accomplished a lot in the four years, since its birth in September 2008. In a 4 September post on the Google Chrome Blog, Sundar Pichai, senior vice president of Google's Chrome and Apps division, lauded the young browser on its fourth birthday and detailed some of the key reasons that inspired its creation.

"When we launched Chrome four years ago, most people accessed the Web through a personal computer," wrote Pichai. "Our goal was to help build a better Web—a Web that is faster, simpler and more secure." Now people are accessing the Internet in far more ways using a wide variety of mobile devices that might not have been considered when Chrome was launched, he wrote.

By creating Chrome and its ability to be used on many different devices, Google developed a way that users could take their bookmarks, favorites and other preferences with them whenever they use Chrome on those devices—by logging into their Chrome accounts and using their resources as they desire, wrote Pichai.

More such features will continue to be added, he predicted. "As you use Chrome on more devices, we remain focused on providing you with the most secure web experience possible. Building on four years of security work, recent improvements such as more robust plug-in sand-boxing and Safe Browsing for downloads ensure that your browsing is more secure than ever before."

To celebrate Chrome's birthday, Google created a Chrome Time Machine "comic book" that describes key moments in Chrome’s history over the past four years, according to Pichai. "You may even uncover a special birthday gift from the Chrome team, if you find the hidden clue and type in the secret code,” it said.

Source: news.efytimes.com

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Samsung’s Galaxy S III passes 20 million sales, within 100 days of launch



The Samsung Galaxy S III was heralded as a stand-out device than can truly challenge Apple and it seems that the early hype is translating to sales after Samsung claimed that its flagship smartphone had passed 20 million sales worldwide, that’s within 100 days of its launch.

The numbers are certainly impressive and Xinhua reports that the figures break down to around 200,000 sales per day. Samsung is traditionally reserved when it comes to discussing sale numbers, but it did reveal how that 20 million splits out regionally: 6 million units were sold in Europe, 4.5 million across Asia, 4 million in North America, and 2.5 million devices on its home turf in South Korea.

News of the landmark comes after the firm revealed that the Android-powered phone had hit the 10 million mark in July, exactly as it had predicted one month previous. Not only has Samsung kept pace with that early speed, but daily sales have grown 190,000 per day in July.

Samsung further stressed its focus on the handset, which will likely gain new competition from Apple’s upcoming new iPhone, and already, it says, the Galaxy S III has generated sales at a rate that is three times faster the Galaxy S II, and six times as fast as the original Galaxy S.

In terms of comparative figures, the Samsung Galaxy S II chalked up 3 million pre-orders. The company recently revealed that it and predecessor the Galaxy S, have together passed 50 million sales across the planet.

Source: thenextweb.com

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Kaspersky Adds Protection To Linux Mail Servers



Kaspersky Linux Mail Security protects Linux-based mail servers against spams and malicious attachments.

Wednesday, September 05, 2012: European cyber security giant, Kaspersky Lab, has announced Kaspersky Linux Mail Security for Linux-based mail server. It's compatible with a variety of Linux distributions and aims to protect mail server against spams and malicious attachments. It features support for IPv6, rich traffic management rules and integration with Active Directory and OpenLDAP along with an automatic notification system.

It also includes support for integration with third-party monitoring software and keeps administrators informed about the security status of the mail system. Spams are mostly of 'hit and run' nature. According to Help Net Security report, “When a wave of spam with new threats is first unleashed, approximately half of all its intended recipients receive the message in the first 10 minutes of the attack.” This requires security solutions to respond quickly to the threat. System administrators can link Kaspersky Linux Mail Security with a Kaspersky Lab’s Urgent Detection System, to get updates to the anti-spam databases very fast.

The new solution from Kaspersky Lab is also compatible with the AMaViS software bridge between a mail server and the anti-spam solution, which further expands compatibility with messaging platforms.

Features of Kaspersky Linux Mail Security:

Exploit detection – Uses Kaspersky Lab’s ZETA Shield technology to block complex threats and targeted attacks that exploit new and unknown vulnerabilities in common software.

Attachment filter and format recognizer – Monitors and filters email attachments by their actual content, regardless of its declared file type or extension, and responds according to each company’s security policies, effectively blocking inappropriate email traffic (e.g., music files and videos) and potentially dangerous files (e.g., executable files).

Enforced anti-spam update service – Connects customers more directly than ever to Kaspersky Lab’s security experts to produce fast responses to malicious spam outbreaks.

Reputation-based spam filtering – Uses the global intelligence of Kaspersky Lab’s Urgent Detection System to categorize spam according to reputation, meaning variants of previously-identified spam attacks are automatically blocked without the need for analyst review.

New AV engine – Provides better anti-malware detection with reduced impact on system resources. In addition, it now includes an updatable heuristic analyzer to better combat new and unknown threats.

Source: news.efytimes.com 

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Microsoft Launches ‘Cloud OS’ Windows Server 2012



Microsoft has officially launched its ‘cloud operating system’, otherwise known as Windows Server 2012

Microsoft has finally launched the server operating system that’s been in development for four years, with the official release of Windows Server 2012.
According to Microsoft, it is geared to serve the current needs of IT for secure but reliable access by workers to corporate data and applications regardless of their location and type of device they are using.

Product Launch

Microsoft experts from the Server and Tools businesses delivered a live streaming presentation 4 September, doing a deep dive on Windows Server 2012 features in the data centre, in the development and deployment of applications and in the delivery of what the company calls “people-centric IT.”

Microsoft officials have dubbed Windows Server 2012 the “Cloud OS,” saying it maximises the use of cloud computing with the reliability, scalability, flexibility and performance capabilities that are built into the OS.
“Today is a momentous day for us,” said Satya Nadella, president of Microsoft’s Server and Tools business, comparing this launch to the release of Windows NT, which ushered in the client-server era of computing in 1993.

Some of the IT trends that are reflected in Windows Server 2012 are ones that have been discussed repeatedly in IT of late: the consumerisation of IT, bring your own device (BYOD), the cloud and Big Data.

“You want to be able to connect the world’s data,” Nadella said. “You want to be able to blend the data that you have in your enterprise with the world’s information to create new value.”

Despite the popularity of cloud computing to help companies reduce the costs to procure and manage hardware, the compute cycles still have to be generated on servers somewhere. Bill Laing, corporate vice president in the Server and Tools business unit, detailed some of the horsepower Windows Server 2012 delivers in a server environment, be it on-premise or at a cloud service provider such as Rackspace, one of several Microsoft partners announcing support for the new OS. Dell introduced new PowerEdge servers running the new OS, and chip-maker Advanced Micro Devices announced that recently introduced Opteron 4200 and 6200 series processor are now optimised to run Windows Server 2012.

Virtualise Everything

Windows Server 2012 can virtualise more than 99 percent of all SQL databases, and support virtual machines (VMs) with 64 virtual processors and 1 terabyte (TB) of memory per VM, and 8,000 VMs per cluster, Laing said.

“You want to virtualise everything, even those workloads considered ‘non-virtualiseable’,” said Jeff Woolsey, principal program manager lead for Servers and Tools. He mentioned SharePoint, Exchange and Dynamics CRM as examples of high-demand workloads that use dozens of processor cores, gigabytes of memory, and have high input-output (I/O) demands.

In software application development, Windows Server 2012 includes .NET 4.5, the Microsoft platform for developing apps to run in Windows.

The development tools are designed to make the apps cloud scalable, flexible and easy to develop, run in a hybrid cloud environment and enable a “rapid, dynamic application lifecycle,” said Scott Guthrie, another corporate vice president in Server and Tools. The goal is to create apps that run in either Windows Server 2012 for on-premise data centres or Windows Azure, the cloud version of the OS.

To make the picture complete, Microsoft detailed how Windows Server 2012 delivers corporate data securely to employees on any device anywhere, what it called “people-centric IT.”
“Having a common identity system is critical to being able to do this,” said Brad Anderson, another corporate vice president in Server and Tools.

To that end, Windows Server 2012 synchronises Microsoft Active Directory credentials from on-premise with Windows Azure Directory in the cloud, Anderson said. Active Directory is the “underpinning” of Microsoft Share Point for document sharing and Windows Intune for device and desktop management.

The Windows Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) for delivering apps and desktop images to end point devices has also been improved to make deployment easier, requiring no more than 13 clicks to provision a VDI, he said.

Corporate apps and data are secured regardless of the end user device with a security protocol that has two requirements, Anderson said: it must require a password at the point at which the use powers up the device and the data must be encrypted.

VMware Challenge

With Windows Server 2012, Microsoft believes it has a server OS for virtual and cloud environments that is competitive with VMware, the virtualisation market share leader. Microsoft has even launched a “Switch to Hyper-V” campaign to get VMware customers to switch to Microsoft, whose virtualisation hypervisor is called Hyper-V.

But VMware was compelled to trash talk Microsoft at its recent VMworld 2012 conference.
“In the virtualisation space their strategy for the last seven years has been to say ‘Our product is good enough,’” former VMware CEO Paul Maritz said of Microsoft.

Maritz said Microsoft is behind the times because enterprise customers’ demands are not just for server virtualisation, but for virtualisation of the entire data centre, including storage, and networking.
However, those are the areas in the data centre that Windows Server 2012 reaches into, said Microsoft’s Nadella.

“You need to take all the resources of the data centre – compute, storage and network – bring them together and share them,” he said.

How well do you know your operating systems? Take our quiz!

Source: techweekeurope.co.uk

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Official: Apple holding iPhone event September 12th, and we'll be there live!

The industry has been abuzz with rumors that Apple was planning a reveal of its next iPhone in mid-September, and now we know the truth. The company has just mailed out invitations to an event in San Francisco on September 12th at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts — where Apple has historically launched new products. The Verge will be there covering the event live, with minute-by-minute updates on everything and anything announced.

The next iPhone has been heavily rumored over the past several months, with multiple photos and videos of alleged iPhone 5 parts and casings in heavy rotation, as well as rather detailed information about new screen technology, radios, and other internal changes. Our editors even obtained a first-hand experience with one of the supposed case designs during the IFA trade show in Berlin, though it's impossible to know if what has been seen thus far is representative of what Apple will announce next Wednesday.

Apple is also expected to announce an "iPad mini" — a smaller version of its tablet — but that announcement is expected to come in October at a separate event.

No matter what happens, The Verge will be in San Francisco on the 12th, covering all the news as it happens — so tune in to our liveblog the day of the event so you don't miss a thing!

Source : theverge.com

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Enterprise mobility: How fast can development go?

I discuss mobile enablement of enterprise apps every day with our clients. The common trend is that it needs to be done now and in the most cost-effective manner (shocking, I know!). The good news is that meeting these expectations is quickly becoming easier. Recently I published a blog post about Backend-as-a-Service. I've recently published my latest research on these BaaS platforms. During this research three things became very apparent:

• BaaS enables mobile apps to be written in hours, not days.  Nearly all BaaS platforms that I investigated had a web-based step-by-step approach to setting up your mobile backend services and some even offered a pure command line interface. Depending on preference, either approach allows for the mobile app backend scaffold to be available in a matter of minutes. Add in some business logic for connecting to your line-of-business (LOB) applications (in your language of choice, no less) and you're ready to focus completely on the mobile interface of your app! At this point the biggest challenge is how to manage your development vs. production backend environments. Not surprisingly, some vendors (StackMob and FatFractal, for instance) already have a solution for managing this as well.

• The mobile developer's toolbox is becoming incredibly diverse and more powerful. Don't need a full BaaS solution but still need to quickly mobile-enable a segment of enterprise functionality? There are a growing set of tools for that as well. Tiggzi is a mobile cloud-based IDE that provides unique drag-and-drop app creation functionality. Cloud Extend Mobile from Active Endpoints allows enterprises to easily customize mobile extensions to existing LOB apps including Salesforce. This is merely the tip of the rapidly growing mobile toolkit iceberg.

• There's never been a better time to be a mobile developer!  Keeping the previous two points in mind, has there ever been a better time to be a mobile developer? The challenges are exciting, the tools are increasingly developer-friendly and, maybe most importantly, the benefits are incredible! We've recently created the Why Mobile App Developers are Smiling Infographicwhich highlights these points along with a podcast where Mike Gualtieri, Jeffrey Hammond and I all discuss the reasons to keep smiling!

As you dive into your mobile development challenges I'd love to hear what tools you're using and how it has changed your day-to-day development work. Come across new tools or platforms? 

Source : zdnet.com

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Hackers Release 1 Million iOS Device UDIDs Obtained from FBI Laptop

Hacker group Antisec has released a dump of 1 million unique identifiers (UDIDs) from Apple iOS devices tonight. The records reportedly came from a file found on an FBI laptop back in March.

During the second week of March 2012, a Dell Vostro notebook, used by Supervisor Special Agent Christopher K. Stangl from FBI Regional Cyber Action Team and New York FBI Office Evidence Response Team was breached using the AtomicReferenceArray vulnerability on Java, during the shell session some files were downloaded from his Desktop folder one of them with the name of "NCFTA_iOS_devices_intel.csv" turned to be a list of 12,367,232 Apple iOS devices including Unique Device Identifiers (UDID), user names, name of device, type of device, Apple Push Notification Service tokens, zipcodes, cellphone numbers, addresses, etc. the personal details fields referring to people appears many times empty leaving the whole list incompleted on many parts. no other file on the same folder makes mention about this list or its purpose.

The file that was found was said to contain over 12 million device records, including Apple UDIDs, usernames, push notification tokens, and in some instances, names, cell phone numbers, addresses and zip codes.

The group released 1 million of these records but stripped most personal information. The final release includes Apple UDIDs, APNS (push notification) Tokens, Device Name (e.g. "Arnold's iPhone") and Device Type (e.g. "iPhone"). MacRumors has been able to confirm that the UDIDs appear to be legitimate.

The source of the data is not entirely clear, though the type of data is typical for the kind of information an iOS app developer would collect to deliver push notifications to users. It seems an App developer or developers are the original likely source of the information, though no specific information is yet available. Right now there's no easy way to determine if your device's UDID was included in the list, beyond downloading the list yourself.

The actual implications of the leak, even if your UDID is found, aren't entirely clear. The UDIDs themselves are rather harmless in isolation. Apple has previously come under fire for the use of these globally identifying ids. The privacy risks, however, typically come from these ids being used across ad networks and apps to piece together a more complete picture of activity and interests of the user. But it was reported back in 2011 that by leveraging existing networks, information and even login access can be obtained from UDIDs. It's not yet clear if the released push tokens can be used in any manner.

Source : macrumors.com

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WebRTC is almost here, and it will change the web

Web Real-Time Communication (WebRTC) is a new HTML5 standard framework that enables the sharing of video, audio, and data directly between web browsers. These capabilities open the door to a new wave of advanced web applications.

If all goes according to plan, over 50% of all web browsers will support this capability in the next three to four months.

This is the most significant step forward in web browser connectivity since 2004, when Google launched Gmail and AJAX was coined. The Asynchronous Javascript and XML (AJAX) approach enabled developers to update the components of a page without the need for full page reloads. This enabled a huge number of new interaction capabilities and was a significant step forward in bringing “native” style applications to the web.

While HTML5 has already brought many new capabilities to the web, it is WebRTC that will spark the most innovation. The ability to directly connect to other web browser opens a new world of possibilities for web developers, enabling new types of applications in telecommunications, gaming, and any other field involving direct user-to-user interaction.

Today, direct communication between browsers is possible only with third-party plugin software and significant proprietary server infrastructure.

Through an open standards approach, WebRTC integrates browser-to-browser communications directly into the fabric of the Internet. This opens many new possibilities such as:

• Rich image and video apps on mobile browsers (e.g. Instagram or Skype in the browser)
• Citizen journalists could stream breaking news directly from their phones to news outlets
• Web sites could add live support and feedback through one line of code
• Effortless file distribution (e.g. Napster) without software.

Sharing live audio, video, and data will be as simple as viewing a web page.

Developers will be able to add these features with relative ease. As we’ve seen in the past, when development becomes simpler, there’s tremendous growth in entrepreneurial experimentation. We should expect a plethora of new audio and video applications from startups and students who only have a basic understanding of peer-to-peer technologies.

WebRTC will also provide new challenges for government censorship and controlling regimes; the peer-to-peer streams will be very difficult to monitor and shut down. We saw the power of social media during the Arab Spring movement last year; imagine it amplified by secure, real-time transmissions of audio and video.

WebRTC will cause major disruption to the billion dollar markets of video conferencing and Internet telephony. You will no longer need Skype on your desktop or smartphone, nor will you need a complex Webex or a Telepresence system. Skype, Cisco, and Polycom will all see their conferencing technology commoditized.

All of this disruption is predicated on the ease of implementing WebRTC and the inherent low cost of peer-to-peer communications. Key to its proliferation will be web developer adoption. This seems likely as the open standards working group and associated browser vendors are making the API as simple and powerful as possible.

The Internet is about to undergo a new wave of innovation. We’re moving to a world of seamless communication, directly between peers and across all devices. As with previous shifts, this will result in a wave of new applications that will change the way we live, work, and play; get excited about the possibilities.

Source: venturebeat.com

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iPhone 5 preview: Processor, graphics, RAM, and storage



Apple is expected to announce their next generation iPhone on September 12, 2012, and while there have been a lot of leaks about what it may look like, there have only been a few about what will power it. That's not surprising. Apple seldom gives specifics about the processors inside the iPhone, or any of their iOS devices. They'll typically announce the name of the processor, maybe the number of cores, but they'll mostly just tell us how many times faster it is than the last generation, both in terms of computing and graphical power. And the amount of RAM is has? Forget about it. We'll likely not know the full details about the iPhone 5 processor until after it's launched and after it's been thoroughly torn down by third parties. That's the Apple way. In the meantime, all we can do is speculate based on past behavior and present technology.

Apple introduced their first in-house system-on-a-chip (SoC) in 2010. Called the Apple A4, Apple used it in the original iPad and carried a version of it over to the iPhone 4. The Apple A4 uses an ARM Cortex-A8 CPU and a PowerVR SGX 535 GPU. It's fabricated at 45nm, along with some performance enhancements supplied by Instrisity, a company Apple later bought. For the iPhone, it also supports 512MB of RAM.



Apple introduced the dual-core Apple A5 SoC in 2011 with the iPad 2, and again carried a version of it over to the iPhone 4S. The Apple A5 has an ARM Cortex-A9 and a PowerVR SGX543MP2 GPU, along with 512MB of RAM. The original Apple A5 was 45nm, but a new version introduced with the Apple TV (2012) and updated iPad 2 (2012) was brought down to 32nm.

Instead of going to an Apple A6 SoC with the new iPad in 2012, Apple added a quad-core PowerVR SGX543MP4 GPU to the to the Apple A5, separated the 1GB of RAM from the package, and called it the Apple A5X.

Apple wouldn't use the Apple A5X in the iPhone 5 as well, however. At least not as is. The primary purpose of the Apple A5X chipset was to support the massive 2048x1536 Retina display that was brand new to the 3rd generation iPad platform. The iPhone went 960x640 Retina back in 2010 with the iPhone 4, so that load is already taken care of. Even if the rumors (addressed below) are accurate, and the iPhone 5 has a slightly bigger 1136x640 Retina display, that's still nothing that would require an A5X-style chipset.

It seems more likely Apple would go with the same type of general CPU and GPU performance improvements in the iPhone 5 that they delivered with the iPhone 4S. Whether or not they stay with the ARM Cortex A9 is a question. The newer, more efficient ARM Cortex A-15 is the next-generation CPU successor, much like the PowerVR 6 Rogue is the next-generation GPU. It would let the iPhone 5 do more, better, and it would be the bleeding edge option for Apple. But it may be bleeding edge enough to wait for next year's iPad 4 and iPhone 6(,1). The more conservative option is another Apple A5 processor at 32nm, tricked out with as much additional performance Apple can coax out of it. And 1GB of RAM.



More RAM is more. For everything from the amount of pages Safari can keep in memory, to the amount of apps -- especially big, greedy games -- that can be switched between without causing system lag, to the general, overall snappiness of the device itself. Apple has historically been stingy -- or efficient, depending on your point of view -- with RAM in the past. 1GB isn't excessive, but would let the iPhone 5 really let itself go.

When it comes to storage, Apple has doubled the maximum available capacity every two years. While the original iPhone shipped with an 8GB maximum, a 16GB version was introduced half a year later. The iPhone 3G also had a 16GB maximum. Both the iPhone 3GS and iPhone 4 have 32GB maximums. Last year, Apple doubled that again with the iPhone 4S, hitting 64GB. History, never mind pricing and NAND flash chip density, suggests we'll stay at 64GB this year as well.

There's been a sketchy parts leak that purports to show an Apple A6 branded processor on the iPhone 5 logic board. At the end of the day, what Apple calls the iPhone 5 chipset is a branding decision, but since Apple controls both the software and hardware, there's no need to simply throw silicone or cores at someone else's code.

So, whether or not it's called the Apple A6, something closer to the Apple A5 rather than Apple A5X in focus and architecture would deliver just exactly the performance vs. power balance Apple wants for their next generation phone.

Source: imore.com

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Now, A Smartphone With Wireless Charger



The upcoming flagship phone from Nokia, the Lumia 920, will have wireless charging, thus paving the way for future charging of handsets.

Tuesday, September 04, 2012: Imagine a life sans your wired smartphone charger, laptop charger, tablet charger. Well, we mean just without the charger, not the devices. While laptop and tablet may still be far from this reality, a smartphone is ready to live without its wired charger. According to a recent report by The Verge, the upcoming flagship phone from Nokia, the Lumia 920, will have wireless charging, thus paving the way for future charging of handsets.

According to the report, it has been mentioned that: “Nokia will introduce its latest Lumia 920 handset at a special event with Microsoft on Wednesday September 5th, we have learned. Images of the Lumia 920 leaked last week and we have been able to confirm them with multiple sources. The Lumia 920 will be Nokia's new flagship Windows Phone and will include some impressive hardware specifications to match. According to sources familiar with the company's Windows Phone plans, Nokia is packaging wireless charging with its Lumia 920”.

Further explaining the exact technique of this charging method, the report reveals: We're told it will support the Qi wireless power standard — making it compatible with other wireless charging products

One most awaited feature of the Lumia 920 is the PureView camera. The report reads: “One rumored aspect of the Lumia 920 is a PureView camera. We can confirm that Nokia will indeed brand its Lumia 920 camera as PureView, but that the camera will be an 8-megapixel one — not the 41-megapixel one found on the company's 808 PureView handset. Nokia is focusing on marketing the Lumia 920 as PureView thanks to some advancements in image stabilization and camera software that it plans to ship on the device. The front of the device will also include a 1.3-megapixel camera”.

Source: news.efytimes.com

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