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Back in the eighties, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency ([DARPA](http://www.darpa.mil/)) spent more than a billion dollars in an attempt to create what was, in effect, Skynet. You know, the self-aware artificial intelligence system that goes bad in The Terminator movie. DARPA called it the Strategic Computing Initiative, but it …

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It's an interesting question, and one that's being raised by Gartner which is predicting that [URL="http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=1392716"]the number of wireless e-mail users will reach an incredible one billion[/URL], worldwide, by the end of 2014. A number that's not too hard to accept, given that earlier this year global business wireless e-mail …

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Another day, another breach. The latest to disclose that there had been some 'unauthorised access' to systems and internal company data' is music streaming service Spotify. The disclosure itself was something of an odd one, claiming that investigation suggested only a single user's data had been compromised following an issue …

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Following on from the news that an eBay password database has been compromised, and universal advice from security experts that users should now change their passwords, one thing has been loud clear: the total lack of that password change requirement from eBay. Sign into eBay and there is nothing to …

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**How do passwords work?** What a password isn't, or at least really shouldn't be, is some kind of secret word or phrase that is simply compared against a table of usernames in a login database. Such plaintext systems are about as secure as a chocolate padlock on a furnace door. …

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The latest major online outfit to suffer from a breach is Bitly, the url shortening service beloved by users of Twitter and Facebook. According to a statement from Bitly CEO Mark Josephson, the company has "reason to believe that Bitly account credentials have been compromised." ![c385df134b645f20b10410443c05d835](/attachments/large/0/c385df134b645f20b10410443c05d835.jpg "c385df134b645f20b10410443c05d835") Although Josephson insists …

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If a week is a long time in politics, then 24 hours is an absolute age in ecommerce security terms. Which make the findings of a Tripwire survey, published today, all the more worrying. The survey, conducted by Atomic Research, questioned 102 financial organizations and 151 retail organizations which process …

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Member Avatar for happygeek

Here’s the concept behind the smartpen: there are millions of pages of good old fashioned handwritten notes taken every day in business meetings and school lessons around the world. Unfortunately they remain trapped within the confines of the paper they are written upon. But what if you could easily share …

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Feedly app left attack window open for malicious JavaScript hackers according to one security researcher. Security consultant and blogger Jeremy S [revealed](http://breaktoprotect.blogspot.in/2014/04/feedly-android-application-zero-day.html) that the Feedly Android app, or at least the version prior to the update on March 17th 2014, had been subject to a zero-day JavaScript code injection vulnerability. …

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Member Avatar for happygeek

As I stated when [reviewing the Minisuit 3-in-1 Folio Case](http://www.daniweb.com/hardware-and-software/tablets-and-mobile-devices/reviews/477039/review-minisuit-3-in-1-keyboard-folio-case-nexus-7-2013#) for the Nexus 7 2013, the most important things a writer looks for in any keyboard are key travel, spacing and feedback. Obviously a travel keyboard throws some additional requirements into the mix such as weight, size and battery life. …

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Member Avatar for happygeek

For a professional writer of any description, there are three things that matter when it comes to the keyboard that they are using: key spacing, key travel and key feedback. The Minisuit 3-in-1 Folio manages, as far as any such small keyboard is ever going to achieve, to get the …

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Member Avatar for happygeek

Given the amount of negative press that has been generated since the announcement of the iPhone 5, calling it everything from boring to disappointing and even naming it the Apple Meh!phone, you might be forgiven for thinking nobody would want to buy it. You would be wrong. Very wrong indeed, …

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From college dropout to one of the world's youngest self-made billionaires, there is no doubting that Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has made quite an impression in his 28 years on this planet. But who is he really? You could go watch 'The Social Network' movie I guess, but …

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Responding to the publication of a report which shows Amazon, Apple and Microsoft all scoring badly when it comes to a reliance upon 'dirty energy' to power their data centers, Apple has hit back with claims that the report over-estimates the power consumption of iCloud and projects being constructed to …

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Android-driven devices, including smartphones and tablets manufactured by the likes of Asus, LG, Motorola and Samsung, are being sold with pre-installed malware according to claims made by the CTO and Founder of Marble Security. David Jevans made the claim following complaints from a potential client that a mobile security platform …

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Wearable computing has been a buzzword for so long that it's easy to get blinded by the hype and not realise that actually it's a reality; and one that got even more real with the announcement by Google of Android Wear. Forget the fitness bands of today and the 'smart …

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So here I am working on a Sunday morning, as usual, and I when I fire up my laptop (which serves as my desktop) a message appears informing that an update is being applied and it won't take long. Imagine my surprise when it turns out that this update appeared …

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It has been [officially confirmed](http://php.net/archive/2013.php#id2013-10-24-2) that the php.net website of the open-source PHP programming language has been hacked and infected with malware. The successful breach of the site came to light yesterday morning when the Google Safe Browsing service started flagging php.net as serving up malicious scripts. This was, at …

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Today is another of those 'Hallmark' IT security days; in the case of Tuesday the 11th of February 2014 that means 'Safer Internet Day'. I'm not going to start yet another rant about the pointlessness of this, and why every day should be Safer Internet Day. If you want to …

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News headlines screaming that yet another Microsoft Windows vulnerability has been discovered, is in the wild or has just been patched are two a penny. Such has it ever been. News headlines declaring that a 'major security problem' has been found with Linux are a different kettle of fish. So …

Member Avatar for happygeek
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So, Microsoft has finally announced that the SkyDrive cloud storage product line is to be renamed OneDrive. This isn't as a result of disappointing user take up leading to a re-branding exercise, it's much more daft than that. Six months ago a judge in a UK court ruled that Microsoft …

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So this morning I get an email from Amazon which promises to inform me of some important information about my Amazon Prime membership. This is the subscription service which, in return for an annual charge of £49 here in the UK, provides free next day delivery on any item which …

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The average DaniWeb member if not already au fait with Pastebin.com is almost certainly aware of something like it. A pastebin has become, for many programmers, a default tool in the coding box and for very good reason: it makes sharing large quantities of code very easy indeed. Of course, …

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It was once the biggest Bitcoin exchange in the world, accounting for as much as 80% of the global trading market in the virtual currency, but Mt. Gox suddenly stopped trading yesterday and reports suggest that some $375m worth of Bitcoins, or 6% of all Bitcoins in circulation, have gone …

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Member Avatar for happygeek

The photo messaging application Snapchat, which allows users to post images, video and text on a time limited basis to a group of recipient users, has been hacked. The attraction of Snapchat, apart from not being Facebook and therefore somewhere teenagers can meet online without their parents having a clue …

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Back in 1992 a national newspaper interview referred to me as being the first virtual celebrity, which wasn't really true. Sure, I had managed to build something of a high profile in the emerging world of the Internet courtesy of my Wavey Davey persona and a disregard for the traditional …

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As a gamer myself, I thought that last year was a pretty good one. After all, not only did I get to play both GTA V and Call of Duty: Ghosts (indeed, I'm still playing it and working my may through the prestige levels) but if I had enough spare …

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One of the oldest technology truisms must be that you only realise the importance of backing up your systems after disaster strikes. This is especially true if you have no backups to turn to. There are, thankfully, few excuses aside from sheer laziness not to backup your data these days; …

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Nintendo is sitting firmly at the top of the games console tree right now, having just been 'bigged up' by the release of the US sales figures for October which show the Wii on 803,000 and the DS on 491,000. Both well ahead of nearest rival, the Xbox 360 on …

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Apparently it's Data Privacy Day tomorrow (January 28th) which, if you will allow me to quote the [Stay Safe Online](https://www.staysafeonline.org/data-privacy-day/about) website blurb, is an "international effort to empower and educate people to protect their privacy and control their digital footprint". Given the Edward Snowden NSA spying revelations that broke during …

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If you have never stopped to think about language in terms of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) then the results of a survey by digital marketing agency Greenlight might make you do just that. According to the global Search and Social Survey, some 76% of people do their online searching in …

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That's the surprising consensus reached at a meeting of 30 CSOs representing some of the UK's leading enterprises held in London during the past week. This despite a poll at the bi-annual [URL="http://www.csointerchange.org"]CSO Interchange[/URL] event revealing that those same CSOs view social networking as the most over-hyped threat. When it …

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[ATTACH=RIGHT]22094[/ATTACH]Facebook Vice-President Chris Cox has [announced](https://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=10150251867797131) the latest in a seemingly never ending run of privacy updates for the worlds' biggest social network. The improvements can be summed up as tightening up the question most often asked by those users worried about their privacy, namely "who can see this?" Unless …

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I have been turning my USB thumb drives into fully encrypted data containers for years now, but readily admit that the prospect of rolling up your sleeves and getting down and dirty with encryption software is not as exciting to everyone as it is to me. However, with removable USB …

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Member Avatar for happygeek

The Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack is becoming the crowbar of the online criminal. In the past we have got rather used to DDoS attacks being one of the favoured approaches of hacktivists, with perhaps the Low Orbit Ion Cannon (LOIC) and later the High Orbit Ion Cannon (HOIC) …

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When it comes to web browsers, my general rule of thumb is that the latest version is usually the most secure and this is certainly the case with Internet Explorer. However, when I started using Internet Explorer 11 on my new Windows 8.1 Pro laptop I soon discovered that latest …

Member Avatar for happygeek
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According to Dell SecureWorks Counter Threat Unit (CTU) security researcher [Keith Jarvis](http://www.secureworks.com/cyber-threat-intelligence/threats/cryptolocker-ransomware/), the CryptoLocker ransomware that has been written about so much of late has infected as many as 250,000 computers during the first 100 days of distribution (staring on the 5th of September, 2013). What's more, Jarvis estimates, based …

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Member Avatar for happygeek

US retail giant Target [has confirmed](http://pressroom.target.com/news/target-confirms-unauthorized-access-to-payment-card-data-in-u-s-stores) that hackers gained access to payment card data that could mean 40 million credit and debit card accounts are at risk. An official statement says that the retailer is "aware of unauthorized access to payment card data that may have impacted certain guests making …

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A [Channel 4 News investigation](http://www.channel4.com/news/phone-mobile-data-24-hours-apps-security-secret) in the UK has revealed that in a 24 hour period just one smartphone made 350,000 requests to 315 different servers and made 30,000 requests to 76 servers when otherwise sitting totally idle for 45 minutes. Oh, and then there was the location data being …

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The odd thing about these particular headphones is the marketing, in my opinion. The very bright colours, mine were what I can only describe as dayglo yellow, are not offset by any calmer touches; the same colour is applied to the wires, cups, buttons, jacks, headband, everything. It's a deliberate …

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According to a [report](http://www.fireeye.com/resources/pdfs/fireeye-operation-ke3chang.pdf) from researchers at US security outfit FireEye, a number of computers belonging to diplomats attending the G20 summit in Russia three months ago, including at least five European foreign ministries, were successfully targeted by Chinese hackers. FireEye researchers had monitored a server, one of 23, used …

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Member Avatar for happygeek

If my iPhone 5s fingerprint data is walled off from the rest of A7 chip and the rest of iOS 7 in a 'Secure Enclave' and is never accessed by iOS or other apps, as Apple claims, then how come it all vanished when my iPhone crashed and I had …

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Microsoft knows it has to do something in order to claw back some kind of market position, not now but five years into the future. The culture of computing is changing amongst the young and hip consumer, and it's moving away from the Microsoft Windows-centric vision of the past. While …

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Black Friday has historically been a very American phenomenon, marking the start of the seasonal Xmas shopping rush and happening the Friday after Thanksgiving. In the past it has led to scenes of semi-rioting and chaos in some stores as the Walmartarati fight over bargain electrical goods. The UK got …

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The iPad is, as those annoyingly creative TV adverts show us, used for all sorts of things by all sorts of people. However, according to a press release that hit the DaniWeb news desk today, you might be forgiven for thinking that shopping isn't one of them. As usual though, …

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According to [BitcoinWatch](http://bitcoinwatch.com/) the current market capitalization of the virtual currency stands at an incredible $10.4 billion. A single Bitcoin is now worth more than $800. In the ongoing aftermath of [the Silk Road takedown](http://www.daniweb.com/hardware-and-software/networking/news/466982/silk-road-2-goes-live-did-the-fbi-arrest-the-wrong-dread-pirate-roberts) many people wrongly assume Bitcoin is some kind of criminal currency, used to trade in …

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Kryten is a Series 4000 mechanoid, the neurotic robotic servant appearing in cult British sitcom Red Dwarf. So what's he got to do with your computer, apart from the somewhat stereotypical link between geeks and science fiction? Well, the Kryten character was played (in all but the first appearance) by …

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Discount coupons are OK, but consumers consider drive-by location marketing an invasion of privacy. That's the warning message that research across four countries (US, UK, Mexico and India) by ISACA would appear to be flagging loud and clear to retailers wanting to maximise the marketing potential of customers with smartphones. …

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Tumblr, the hugely popular blogging service which was bought by Yahoo! last month, has advised mobile users to change their passwords, and change them immediately. In a posting to the Tumblr staff blog, a spokesperson states "We have just released a very important security update for our iPhone and iPad …

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Which? magazine [has revealed](http://blogs.which.co.uk/technology/phones-3/apple-iphone-5s-fastest-phone-samsung-galaxy-s4-lg-g2/) the new Apple iPhone 5s to be the fastest smartphone of all in the latest round of processor benchmarking tests, despite it having less cores that rival handsets. Not only was the 5s almost twice as fast as the iPhone 5 in testing, but also around …

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The End.