Tag: user agreement

Apple’s @me and @mac e-mail users now have @icloud, too

Owners of @me.com and @mac.com e-mail addresses—relics of Apple’s past attempts at offering cloud services—now own an @icloud address too. The company began sending out e-mails to those who have accounts on the old domains on Tuesday, letting them know they can now take advantage of Apple’s latest e-mail service in the form of iCloud. But worry not: if you’ve been using your old addresses but moved your account to iCloud earlier this year, you’ll still be able to keep using them (whether or not you choose to use the new @icloud.com address). The move was foreshadowed earlier this year as part of an iOS 6 prerelease beta to developers. In the iOS 6 Beta 3 changelog, Apple stated those signing up for new Apple IDs, as well as those enabling Mail on iCloud for the first time, would automatically receive an @icloud.com address. But if you had an existing @me.com address from the MobileMe days, or even a @mac.com address from the .Mac days, you would receive an iCloud address that matched the username you previously had. That appears to be the case now with Apple alerting users to the change. As pointed out by our friends at TidBITS , there’s no difference in implementation—if you want to make use of the new address, you just have to add it to your mail client. If you don’t want to use the new address, however, you don’t have to. You can stick to the old ones, as long as you weren’t one of the stubborn few who didn’t move your MobileMe account to iCloud before the beginning of August. Read on Ars Technica | Comments

Read more here:
Apple’s @me and @mac e-mail users now have @icloud, too

Researcher advises against use of Sophos antivirus on critical systems

Antivirus provider Sophos has fixed a variety of dangerous defects in its products that were discovered by a security researcher who is recommending many customers reconsider their decision to rely on the company. “Sophos claim that their products are deployed throughout healthcare, government, finance, and even the military,” Tavis Ormandy wrote in an e-mail posted to a public security forum . “The chaos a motivated attacker could cause to these systems is a realistic global threat. For this reason, Sophos products should only ever be considered for low-value non-critical systems and never deployed on networks or environments where a complete compromise by adversaries would be inconvenient.” A more detailed report that accompanied Ormandy’s e-mail outlined a series of vulnerabilities that attackers can exploit remotely to gain complete control over computers running unpatched versions of the Sophos software. At least one of them requires no interaction on the part of a victim, opening the possibility of self-replicating attacks, as compromised machines in turn exploit other machines, he said. The researcher provided what he said was a working exploit against Sophos version 8.0.6 running Apple’s OS X. Attackers could “easily” rewrite the code to work against unpatched Sophos products that run on the Windows or Linux operating systems, he said. Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Original post:
Researcher advises against use of Sophos antivirus on critical systems

Google infringes old Lycos patents, must pay $30 million

Vringo is a little company that’s made a huge bet on suing Google over patents. Today that bet paid off, although to a much lesser degree than its investors hoped earlier. After a two-week trial in Virginia, a jury found that Google’s advertising system infringes two old Lycos patents purchased by Vringo in 2011, and that those patents are valid. Google and several of its advertising partners were ordered to pay a total of about $30 million. That’s a lot of money, but far less than the $493 million Vringo was seeking. According to a report  just published in the Virginian-Pilot , the jury found that Google will have to pay $15.9 million. Its advertising partners must pay smaller amounts: $7.9 million in damages for AOL, $6.6 million for IAC Search & Media, $98,800 for Target, and $4,000 for Gannett. The jury also said Google should pay an ongoing royalty; but whether that ultimately sticks is up to the judge. The Vringo case is remarkable for two reasons: first, it’s rare to see a high-profile patent attack played out directly in the stock market, with investors speculating on each move in court. Second, demonstratives submitted in Vringo’s case show a fascinating story in pictures of how a company that’s more or less a “patent troll” tries to convince a jury to shower it with money. Some of those visuals are posted below. Read 11 remaining paragraphs | Comments

View the original here:
Google infringes old Lycos patents, must pay $30 million

Sharp says there is “material doubt” over its corporate survival

Sharp , the century-old stalwart of Japanese electronics, is in deep trouble . On Thursday, the company said it sustained a ¥249.1 billion ($3.12 billion) loss for its latest quarter, the second year it had suffered record deficits. The company still has about $10 billion of debt. “As operating and net loss for the six months ended September 30, 2012 were huge, continuing from the previous year, cash flows from operating activities were negative,” the company wrote in its quarterly earnings report (PDF). Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

See more here:
Sharp says there is “material doubt” over its corporate survival

IBM prepares for end of process shrinks with carbon nanotube transistors

Carbon nanotubes sit on top of features etched in silicon. IBM Research The shrinking size of features on modern processors is slowly approaching a limit where the wiring on chips will only be a few atoms across. As this point approaches, both making these features and controlling the flow of current through them becomes a serious challenge, one that bumps up against basic limits of materials. During my visit to IBM’s Watson Research Center, it was clear that people in the company is already thinking about what to do when they run into these limits. For at least some of them, the answer would involve a radical departure from traditional chipmaking approaches, swithching from traditional semiconductors to carbon nanotubes. And, while I was there, the team was preparing a paper (now released by Nature Nanotechnology ) that would report some significant progress: a chip with 10,000 working transistors made from nanotubes, formed at a density that’s two orders of magnitude higher than any previously reported effort. During my visit to Watson, I spoke with George Tulevski, who is working on the nanotube project, and is one of the authors of the recent paper. Tulevski described nanotbues as a radical rethinking of how you build a chip. “Silicoon is a solid you carve down,” he told Ars, “while nanoubes are something you have to build up.” In other words, you can’t start with a sheet of nanotubes and etch them until you’re left with the wiring you want. Read 9 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Continue reading here:
IBM prepares for end of process shrinks with carbon nanotube transistors

Storage Spaces explained: a great feature, when it works

Windows Home Server was never a particularly popular product, but it did bring some interesting features to the table for the few who used it and became fans. One of these features was called Drive Extender, and its claim to fame was that it allowed users to pool their system’s hard drives so that they were seen by the operating system as one large hard drive. This obviated the need to keep track of the amount of free space across several disks, and it also allowed users to automatically mirror their data to multiple disks at once, keeping their files safe in the event of drive failure. Microsoft killed Drive Extender not long before pulling the plug on the Windows Home Server entirely , but the intent behind it lives on in Windows 8’s new Storage Spaces feature: “Storage Spaces is not intended to be a feature-by-feature replacement for that specialized solution,” wrote Microsoft’s Rajeev Nagar in a blog post introducing the feature, “but it does deliver on many of its core requirements.” In essence, Storage Spaces takes most of Drive Extender’s underlying functionality and implements it in a way that is more technically sound; early versions of Drive Extender sometimes corrupted data when copying files between drives and mangled file metadata, but the underlying filesystem improvements made to support Storage Spaces should make it much more robust, at least in theory. Read 40 remaining paragraphs | Comments

See the article here:
Storage Spaces explained: a great feature, when it works

$99 Raspberry Pi-sized “supercomputer” hits Kickstarter goal

A prototype of Parallella. The final version will be the size of a credit card. Adapteva A month ago, we told you about a chipmaker called Adapteva that turned to Kickstarter in a bid to build a new platform that would be the size of a Raspberry Pi and an alternative to expensive parallel computing platforms. Adapteva needed at least $750,000 to build what it is calling “Parallella”—and it has hit the goal. Today is the Kickstarter deadline, and the project is up to more than $830,000  with a few hours to go. ( UPDATE : The fundraiser hit $898,921 when time expired.) As a result, Adapteva will build 16-core boards capable of 26 gigaflops performance, costing $99 each. The board uses RISC cores capable of speeds of 1GHz each. There is also a dual-core ARM A9-based system-on-chip, with the 16-core RISC chips acting as a coprocessor to speed up tasks. Adapteva is well short of its stretch goal of $3 million, which would have resulted in a 64-core board hitting 90 gigaflops, and built using a more expensive 28-nanometer process rather than the 65-nanometer process used for the base model. The 64-core board would have cost $199. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Visit link:
$99 Raspberry Pi-sized “supercomputer” hits Kickstarter goal

Jailbreaking now legal under DMCA for smartphones, but not tablets

Yutaka Tsutano The Digital Millennium Copyright makes it illegal to “circumvent” digital rights management schemes. But when Congress passed the DMCA in 1998, it gave the Librarian of Congress the power to grant exemptions. The latest batch of exemptions, which will be in force for three years, were announced on Thursday. Between now and late 2015, there will be five categories of circumvention that will be allowed under the Librarian’s rules, one fewer than the current batch of exemptions , which was announced in July 2010. The new exemptions take effect October 28. The new batch of exemptions illustrate the fundamentally arbitrary nature of the DMCA’s exemption process. For the next three years, you’ll be allowed to jailbreak smartphones but not tablet computers. You’ll be able to unlock phones purchased before January 2013 but not phones purchased after that. It will be legal to rip DVDs to use an excerpt in a documentary, but not to play it on your iPad. None of these distinctions makes very much sense. But Congress probably deserves more blame for this than the Librarian of Congress. Read 17 remaining paragraphs | Comments

See the article here:
Jailbreaking now legal under DMCA for smartphones, but not tablets

US federal agency dropping 17,000 BlackBerrys in favor of iPhones

It’s no secret that Research In Motion, the maker of the fabled BlackBerry, is on the decline . If falling subscriber numbers last month weren’t bad enough, last week, the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) said that it will end its contract with RIM , replacing over 17,000 employees devices with iPhones in a deal worth $2.1 million. “The RIM technology, however, can no longer meet the mobile technology needs of the agency,” the agency wrote in a 10-page document , adding that “no other company’s products can meet the agency’s needs.” Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

More:
US federal agency dropping 17,000 BlackBerrys in favor of iPhones