news and knowledge from around the globe compiled by Global EDD Group
In addition to selling off its PC business, Hewlett-Packard will reportedly make a $10 billion bid for Autonomy, according to Bloomberg.
Autonomy provides software for enterprises to help find and make sense of data hidden away in documents and other files throughout their organization. It’s the largest software company by market cap in the U.K.
Key findings in the report include:
via TRACE Report Offers Global Anti-Bribery Enforcement Stats.
Are almost 50 percent of the world’s smartphones running Google’s Android? According to Monday data from Canalys, Android ended the second quarter with 48 percent of the market, with Asia Pacific leading the charge.
Globally, the smartphone market is up 73 percent from last year, with 107.7 million devices shipped in the last quarter. Of the 56 countries tracked by Canalys, Android topped 35 of them, with 51.9 million shipments overall.
Why the boost? Canalys pointed to strong Android support from major handset makers like Samsung, HTC, LG, Motorola, Sony Ericsson, ZTE, and Huawei. Android holds 85 percent of the market in South Korea and 71 percent in Taiwan alone.
Apple came in second place with 20.3 million iPhones sold and 19 percent of the market, which was enough to overtake Nokia’s Symbian platform and make Cupertino the world’s top smartphone vendor.
“The iPhone has been a phenomenal success story for Apple and a watershed product for the market,” Canalys vice president and principal analyst Chris Jones said in a statement. “It’s an impressive success story, given that Apple has only been in the smartphone market for four years. With the next-generation iPhone anticipated in Q3, it’s likely that Apple’s position will grow even stronger in the second half of the year.”
via Android on Nearly 50 Percent of World’s Smartphones, Report Finds | News & Opinion | PCMag.com.
Trend Micro said Friday that in addition to the spear phishing attempts on Google’s Gmail, the company has traced efforts to penetrate Yahoo Mail and Microsoft’s Hotmail as well.
Trend Micro said that the attacks on the other two email systems were apparently “separately conducted,” but the objectives were the same: obtain the logins and passwords of the user, as a foundation for staging future attacks.
On Wednesday, Google disclosed that hundreds of its Gmail accounts had been compromised, including personal email accounts used by reporters, activists, and government officials. The attacks appeared to have come from servers in China, Google said, although Chinese officials denied responsibility. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton called the attacks “very serious”, and said the FBI had begun an investigation. The White House said Friday that no government email accounts were compromised in the attacks.
Phishing uses social engineering to try and persuade the victim to divulge personal details, including their username and password.
“The objective of the attackers appears to be to gain access to the target’s Webmail accounts in order to monitor his/her communications and, possibly, to stage future attacks,” Nart Villeneuve, a senior threat researcher for TrendLabs, said in a blog post. “In the recent case revealed by Google, the attackers used a phishing attack to gain access to the target’s Gmail account then proceeded to add their own email addresses to the “forwarding and delegation settings,” allowing them to send and receive email messages via the compromised accounts.”
via Report: Gmail Attacks Replicated on Hotmail, Yahoo | News & Opinion | PCMag.com.
Google is preparing to roll out a payment system on Sprint phones that would use near-field communications (NFC) technology, according to a report.
Bloomberg reported Tuesday that the service would be available on the Sprint Nexus S across five different U.S. metropolitan regions: New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago and Washington, D.C.
Google has sent out announcements to a press event at 11:15 AM local time at Google’s New York offices on Thursday, advertised as a partner even where Google will show off its “latest innovations”.
Google representatives couldn’t immediately be reached for comment. NFC technology is also reportedly being used by the Apple iPhone 5. Three major U.S. wireless carriers recently announced their support for an NFC payment system called Isis, which would let Americans pay for items at retail stores with their mobile phones rather than using physical credit cards.
Google Eric Schmidt, then the company’s chief executive, showed off the NFC technology last November at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, running the “Gingerbread” version of the Android operating system.
NFC, or near-field communications, is a way for two devices to communicate small amounts of data when they’re placed about four inches apart. Similar technologies are used for “mobile wallet” services such as Japan’s popular Mobile Felica system, where a mobile phone stores encrypted credit-card data, transit pass information, or retail coupons, and can transmit them to readers at stores or train stations with a tap.
via Report: Google, Sprint to Launch NFC Payments Thursday | News & Opinion | PCMag.com.
A government review of the FBI agents who investigate national security-related computer intrusions found about a third of them lack the required technical skills to do their jobs.
Of 36 agents interviewed, 13 were deficient in at least some of the necessary capabilities, according to a U.S. Justice Department inspector general’s report released today. Five of the agents told the inspector general’s office that they viewed themselves as unqualified to conduct investigations of computer hacking involving national security.
“One agent told us that he was assigned his first counterterrorism intrusion case but he did not know how to investigate a national security intrusion case,” according to the report.
National security intrusions are the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s top cyber priority, the report said. Even so, the report found that the forensic and analytical capability of FBI field offices was “inadequate to support national security intrusion investigations.”
via FBI Agents Can Lack Skills to Investigate Computer Intrusions, Report Says – Bloomberg.
Twitter is in advanced talks to acquire social networking management solutions provider TweetDeck for about $50 million. The Wall Street Journal reports Twitter is targeting TweetDeck in an effort to simplify its microblogging services and broaden the appeal of its platform for both new and existing users. TweetDeck effectively serves as a personalized browser spanning across a user’s social networks and contacts, offering customization tools to simplify tweeting and sharing photos, videos and links. Twitter declined to comment; TweetDeck CEO Iain Dodsworth could not be reached.
According to The Wall Street Journal, Twitter’s plans to enhance its overall appeal include welcoming new users with tweets from individuals in their specific geographic region, in part to dispel the image that the platform serves as little more than a soapbox for celebrities to broadcast their opinions.
via Report: Twitter deep into talks to purchase TweetDeck – FierceMobileContent.
All iPhones will reportedly have the Personal Hotspot capability similar to what Verizon Wireless announced Tuesday for its iPhone coming Feb. 10.
Carriers will have to support the feature giving Wi-Fi access to up to five devices. It’s not clear how soon the capability would come to AT&T, whose role as the exclusive seller of the iPhone in the U.S ended with Verizon’s announcement.
The Personal Hotspot feature is enabled in all iPhones in the upcoming iOS Version 4.3, according to a Wednesday posting in Boy Genius Report.
Apple officials could not be reached to comment on the report, but BGR relied on an unnamed source to confirm the existence of the Personal Hotspot capability in iOS 4.3. BGR showed screenshots that included the Personal Hotspot feature under Wi-Fi and Airplane Mode settings in an iPhone interface.
via All iPhones reported to get Personal Hotspot with iOS 4.3 – Computerworld.
Report:
Fujitsu Research Reveals Global Consumer Attitudes to Data Privacy Crucial to Realizing Benefits of Cloud
Fujitsu is publishing a series of reports based on research into global consumer attitudes towards the handling of personal data in the cloud. Covering 12 countries and 6000 respondents, we intend the series to inform our customers as to what their customers – consumer and citizens – expect from their governments and corporations with regard to data privacy in the cloud today, and to help them navigate towards realizing the wider social and business benefits of cloud computing in the future.
IPv4 addresses are almost out of stock. This isn’t the first time somebody rang a bell about it, but now the situation is getting desperate. According to reputable institutions and individuals, within the first quarter of 2011, we could run completely out of IPv4 addresses.
The news that current addressing scheme (i.e. IPv4) will soon reach its maximum capacity is not new, in fact, there have been warnings for quite some time. But the news is still bound to cause a lot of turmoil. Although it doesn’t mean the end of the internet, it will leave new users without an IP address. No IP address means no Internet connection, so what is the solution?
IPv4 Isn’t Oil — How Can We Run Out of Stock?
The IPv4 Address Report is one of the sites where the availability of IPv4 addresses is reported daily. Their Nov 16th report states that the IANA pool of unallocated IPv4 addresses will exhaust on March 13th, 2011 and that the unallocated addresses equal to only 4 percent of all addresses.
When you hear warnings all the time and disaster doesn’t strike, you don’t believe in such warnings anymore. Remember the Y2K? Did disaster strike then? No, it didn’t, mainly because everybody was too scared to neglect the warning and did what they were supposed to do in order to make their system compliant.
The situation with IPv4 is similar — if we don’t do what we need to do in order to avoid disaster, it will strike. In fact, measures have been taken long ago. When the limitations of IPv4 became clear, an “upgrade” — the so-called IPv6 — was developed. However, in past decades, not much has been done in order to push the implementation of IPv6 by companies and individuals.
via IPv4 Out of Stock! Will IPv6 Finally Make it Mainstream?.
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