SAP and Oracle have settled a long-standing copyright-infringement lawsuit, with the German company agreeing to pay about US$359 million in damages and interest to Oracle instead of the $1.3 billion awarded in 2010. Oracle sued SAP in 2007 on allegations that its now-defunct subsidiary, TomorrowNow, had illegally downloaded Oracle’s software …
AV vendors, in fierce competition for users, should remember that cooperation is key in fighting malware, a top Microsoft security official said Friday. Data sharing between vendors has resulted in a drop in the overall number of malware families affecting computers, said Dennis Batchelder, director of the Microsoft Malware Protection …
With the European Space Agency’s robotic lander now sitting on a comet hurtling in orbit around the sun, the 10-year trip is over and the real science of the mission has begun. That means scientists may get valuable clues about the origins of the sun and planets, as well as …
The U.S. Department of Justice is putting devices that emulate cellphone towers in Cessna aircraft and flying them around the country to track the locations of cellphones, a practice that targets criminal suspects but may also affect thousands of U.S. citizens, according to a news report Thursday. The program is …
Well, that took longer than expected. Although Microsoft began bundling Yammer with Office 365 shortly after acquiring the enterprise social networking (ESN) startup in mid-2012, users so far have had to log in separately to both suites, an inconvenience that will soon end. Microsoft will start to roll out single …
Mozilla kicked off its long-under-development plan to run ads in Firefox with the launch of version 33.1 on Monday. The ads, which Mozilla calls “sponsored tiles,” were first discussed by the company in February. In the months that followed, Mozilla defended the in-browser ad project against critics who called it …
Amazon and Hachette have resolved a contentious contract battle that caught readers and authors in the crossfire for months. Neither company is talking specifics, but the New York Times reports that Hachette will get the ability to set its own ebook prices. At the same time, Amazon will offer specific …
Matt Corddry, Facebook’s director of hardware engineering, should be grateful to Tesla. Not because he drives one (he doesn’t), but because the popularity of its electric cars could help Facebook take a little more cost out of running its data centers. Corddry runs Facebook’s hardware engineering lab, which designs the …
IBM plans to load future supercomputers with more co-processors and accelerators to increase computing speed and power efficiency. Supercomputers with this new architecture could be out within the next year. The aim is to boost data processing at the storage, memory and I/O levels, said Dave Turek, vice president of …
Mozilla has launched a virtual reality website this week in hopes of inspiring others to build their own. Featuring demos including a fly-through of coastal British Columbia and a 360-degree view of the Arctic, MozVR.com is intended to offer a “native VR” Web experience, Mozilla technologists said in a statement. …
ACM The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) has announced that its annual A.M. Turing Award, sometimes called the Nobel Prize in Computing, will now come with a $1M award courtesy of Google. Since 2007, the award came with a $250K prize funded by Google and Intel. The award, which goes …
The world’s 19 biggest automakers have agreed to principles they say will protect driver privacy in an electronic age where in-vehicle computers collect everything from location and speed to what smartphone you use. A 19-page letter committing to the principles was submitted to the Federal Trade Commisison from the industry’s …
Microsoft yesterday rolled out the next update to its Windows 10 Technical Preview, just three weeks after the previous version arrived. But one change that Microsoft trumpeted — an alteration to how OneDrive, the company’s cloud-based storage service, synchronizes files — got a big thumbs down from users. The update, …
President Barack Obama’s call for ISPs to be regulated like traditional telecommunications carriers continued to send shockwaves through the Internet industry on Wednesday as the head of Cisco Systems warned that the idea could hurt his company’s business. Internet service providers ordered less network gear during Cisco’s fiscal first quarter …
Sophos is betting entirely on the cloud in a bid to make it easier for understaffed IT departments to manage cyberattacks. Kris Hagerman, CEO of the computer security company, said Thursday the challenge is that SMBs often have small IT departments and may have no one dedicated to full-time security. …
Fujitsu wants to promote Internet of Things (IoT) technologies by launching a cloud-based development platform. The Human-Centric IoT platform allows Fujitsu customers to try out their ideas for IoT applications and works with Fujitsu sensors, networks, middleware and applications, according to the electronics manufacturer. Connecting offline equipment to the Internet …
Salesforce has a solid lock on the SMB space, and more forward-looking large organizations have moved to its cloud CRM, marketing and sales solutions, apparently to great success. But for every Virgin America or Burberry, there are many, many more older companies out there with siloed-off, older systems; they couldn’t get …
“This year was the year of the breach,” ISACA international president Robert Stroud told CSO Online. ISACA, a global association of risk and cybersecurity professionals, released its global IT Risk/Reward Barometer today, a survey of over 1,600 IT professionals and 4,000 consumers, in which 94 percent of Americans said they …
Facebook wants its users to take control of their own privacy. The social network today launched Privacy Basics, a page set up to offer users advice and how-to tips to make sure they have the level of privacy they want for their Facebook profiles. Facebook also is giving users an …
BlackBerry announced a renewed enterprise focus on Thursday, including a partnership with Samsung that provides secure mobile software for certain Samsung Android smartphones and tablets. The software, to be available early next year, will bring together BlackBerry’s new BES12 Enterprise Mobility Management (EMM) software with Samsung smartphones and tablets that …
Microsoft plans to beef up Active Directory’s security with machine learning technology from a startup it has acquired. The security technology from Aorato will give Microsoft customers “a new level of protection against threats through better visibility into their identity infrastructure,” Takeshi Numoto, corporate vice president of Cloud and Enterprise …
LAS VEGAS – Amazon Web Services operates at huge scale – in Gartner’s latest Magic Quadrant the research firm estimated AWS’s capacity at five times larger than the company’s next 14 competitors combined. The cloud has 11 regions around the world made up of 28 availability zones, each of which …
Low battery consumption will be a key to success for IoT products, and chip makers are working on more frugal processors and microcontrollers to make that happen. Improved energy efficiency was a common theme at the Electronica conference in Munich this week, where next-generation IoT chipsets were plentiful. Energy efficiency …
Well, no one can say Facebook is hiding its privacy policies any more. The network just proposed updates to clarify the information it collects on you and how it uses that data to sell ads. Facebook also turned its privacy check-up into an animated interactive tour in a new section …
SanDisk today announced a USB flash drive with a Lightning connector that can be used with iPhones and iPads to automatically offload photos and videos with special software. The new iXpand Flash Drive is three times faster than current portable storage flash devices in its class, with up to 2.5MBps …
For the past two years AWS’s re:Invent conferences have primarily been about Amazon’s public cloud. In 2014, no doubt the focus is still on public Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). But Amazon is starting to embrace hybrid clouds now too, at least in its own way. During the first day’s …