About a decade or so ago, it was almost impossible to find a tech analyst who wasn’t predicting that radio-frequency identification (RFID) would soon change the world. While RFID eventually became a useful tool in retail, logistics, healthcare and a handful of other enterprise sectors, the technology largely lurked in …
All Web administrators want to secure their sites for the benefit of their users (we hope), but doing so can be a cumbersome and error-prone task. Now, those using the Varnish Web acceleration software will have a helping hand in this task, as the enterprise edition can be configured to …
Enterprise storage is a long-term bet. Pure Storage, a growing maker of all-flash arrays, is reshuffling the deck on that gamble in a way that might save IT departments time and money. Pure’s plan is to let customers keep the same system for a decade, upgrading various components as improved …
Virtualization has taken over the data center. Cloud computing has become a household phrase and big data is going beyond hype to delivering results, but what’s next? Software-defined infrastructure, or SDI, is fast becoming a reality. If you’re not familiar with SDI, it’s basically an infrastructure in which the application …
SanDisk, known for thumb drives, memory cards and internal SSD, has announced its first line-up of pocket-sized, high-capacity external drives. The new line of drives includes four products of varying size, ranging in capacity from 120GB to 1.9TB. The new line includes the Extreme 900 Portable SSD, which uses the …
You’d think in the digital age that no country would dare Photoshop satellite images and then use those images to blame a different country for shooting down a plane that resulted in all 298 passengers being killed. Yet that’s exactly what Russia did to point the finger of blame at …
Intel has agreed to spend a whopping $16.7 billion to acquire Altera, a company that makes something Intel lacks: FPGAs (field-programmable gate arrays), which are reprogrammable chips. Some of Intel’s major acquisitions in the past haven’t panned out well, most notably the 2010 purchase of McAfee for $7.68 billion, so …
Using data in marketing is a tremendous competitive advantage for any organization, in every industry. Data is the fuel powering business processes, machines, sensors and customized user experiences. As a result, enterprises today are confronted with an unparalleled opportunity to put massive amounts of data, structured and unstructured, to work in optimizing …
People we love to hate on LinkedIn Image by Thinkstock Some social media platforms try to be everything to everyone, but LinkedIn is different. The service offers a lot of features to its 364 million registered members, but it’s also uniquely focused and specifically tailored for working professionals. The eight …
Intel has agreed to shell out a whopping US$16.7 billion to acquire Altera, a company that makes something Intel lacks: FPGAs (field-programmable gate arrays), which are reprogrammable chips. Some of Intel’s major acquisitions in the past haven’t panned out well, most notably the 2010 purchase of McAfee for $7.68 billion, …
Nokia wants to help mobile network operators launch new services and cut their costs with a new range of servers, switches and storage they can use to virtualize their networks. Enterprises have already adopted virtualization and cloud-based IT infrastructures, and now telecommunications operators are looking at doing the same thing. …
A Pennsylvania man who posted violent rap lyrics and other comments on Facebook about his estranged wife, an FBI agent and nearby elementary schools is not guilty of making criminal threats, the U.S. Supreme Court has decided. The justices, in a 7-2 decision released Monday, overturned the 2011 conviction of …
A Pennsylvania man who posted violent rap lyrics and other comments on Facebook about his estranged wife, an FBI agent and nearby elementary schools is not guilty of making criminal threats, the U.S. Supreme Court has decided. Justices, in a 7-2 decision released Monday, overturned the 2011 conviction of Anthony …
Goodbye, Google Wallet! It’s Android Pay’s time to shine. Google has finally souped up its mobile payments system—though not too much. It’s a pretty straightforward upgrade, with a few new features added to make it more secure than its predecessor. If you’re interested in using it yourself, here’s a quick …
Google has launched a centralized hub that lets users manage the privacy and security controls of all its services, and introduced a site with information about these topics. The hub, called My Account, is not the first effort from Google to centralize settings: in 2009, it introduced a dashboard to …
For now, SanDisk is claiming the crown for the smallest USB 3.0 drive with 128GB of storage. The Ultra Fit USB 3.0 is shorter than a dime and narrower than a penny, and now supports capacities up to 128GB. While tiny flash drives like this aren’t new, they tend to …
The next time someone tags you in a Facebook post, the social network can send you a super secret notification that not even the National Security Agency can read—at least as far as we know. On Monday, Facebook announced that you can now add an OpenPGP key to your Facebook …
More than three years ago, Google unified its privacy policy. Now it’s unifying your privacy (and security) information. The company recently announced an overhaul to the Google account dashboard that puts nearly every privacy and security feature in one place. The new My Account section includes Google’s privacy and security …
Some Facebook users should soon be able to receive encrypted emails from the social networking site if they add PGP public keys to their profiles. Facebook called the PGP feature “experimental” and said it is slowly rolling it out, although a timeline wasn’t provided. The PGP key details will be …
Slashdot and the SourceForge controversy Some folks might not know that Slashdot and SourceForge are both owned by the same parent company, Slashdot Media. That corporate connection has given rise to suspicions that Slashdot has been burying recent stories critical of SourceForge. The Danluu blog reported on Slashdot and SourceForge: …
When Amazon this month said that it would start offering same-day delivery for free, it seemed to make perfect sense. If you’ve got a new service that customers are reluctant to try, making it free is a good come-on. The problem is the extensive restrictions on the service — for …
Samsung crisis There are lots of reasons Samsung might need to climb aboard. The Tizen OS will take years to build up as a credible OS choice, leaving the company struggling to create some kind of unique sales position even as it competes with dozens of other Android device makers. …
Chip maker Mediatek is preparing to enter the laptop business, with the first Chromebooks based on its processors due to appear soon. So said Mediatek senior vice president Jeffrey Ju at the Computex trade show in Taipei. The company also showed a non-working Chromebook with its 64-bit MT8173 quad-core processor …
Asustek Computer has built an Android smartphone with 13-megapixel cameras front and back for the selfie lover. The phone seems nearly identical to the Zenfone 2, which launched a month ago in the U.S., but Asus upgraded the front-facing camera and touted the phone’s photo editing software during a company …
Pursuing opportunities in the Internet of Things market, Intel has sealed a deal to buy Altera in an all-cash transaction valued at about $16.7 billion, which would be Intel’s largest acquisition ever. News reports that the companies were in talks first surfaced in late March. However, those negotiations reportedly broke …
Microsoft’s Windows 10 upgrade “nag” campaign — an effort to convince customers running Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 to upgrade to the new operating system — began today, with users reporting that they’d seen the ad-like screens. Computerworld confirmed on several Windows 7 PCs that Microsoft had triggered the notification. …