Facebook prying: Watchdogs hit back on excessive harvesting of your data Amid concerns over Facebook’s use of tracking users with pixels, Belgium joins the Netherlands, France, and EC in legal moves. Read More According to The Wall Street Journal, Palmer Luckey, the founder of Oculus, a virtual reality company, was fired by Facebook because “he donated $10,000 to an anti-Hillary… Read more →
Internet Explorer’s scripting engine was the favorite target of a North Korean cyber-espionage group this year, after the hackers deployed two zero-days, but also crafted new exploits for two other older vulnerabilities. The group’s name is DarkHotel, a cyber-espionage group that McAfee and many other cyber-security firms have already linked to the Pyongyang regime. The group has been active since… Read more →
Microsoft added to its Office 365 roadmap last week mention of a coming Google G Suite to Office 365 “migration experience.” The offering is in development and will be ready by Q2 calendar 2019, according to the roadmap. Credit: Microsoft Here’s the roadmap entry, in full: “We’ve heard the feedback and we’re excited to announce the new G Suite migration… Read more →
The US Department of Energy’s Summit supercomputer, with a recently upgraded performance score of 143.5 petaflops, has widened its lead as the world’s most powerful supercomputer. According to the November edition of the Top500 List, Summit’s sister system Sierra also gained performance improvements to reach 94.6 petaflops and overtake the No. 2 spot from China’s Sunway TaihuLight. Also: The growing… Read more →
Voice recognition software giant Nuance on Monday announced that it’s selling its document imaging business to Kofax for $400 million. Kofax is a supplier of of intelligent automation software and plans to use the complementary product line from Nuance to expand the functionality of its portfolio. Specifically, Kofax CEO Reynolds Bish said the purchase will add key technologies such as… Read more →
The HTTP-over-QUIC experimental protocol will be renamed to HTTP/3 and is expected to become the third official version of the HTTP protocol, officials at the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) have revealed. This will become the second Google-developed experimental technology to become an official HTTP protocol upgrade after Google’s SPDY technology became the base of HTTP/2. HTTP-over-QUIC is a rewrite… Read more →
The Brazilian Central Bank (BC) is introducing instant payments next year as part of a number of measures geared at increasing market attractiveness and growth of the fintech segment. Under the current system, in order to buy goods or services Brazilians need to use cards, cash or the boleto – a barcoded payment slip referring to a purchase, which can… Read more →
Security is a big worry for the Internet of Things. We’ve already seen countless incidents where smart internet-connected devices are taken over by an attacker and put to unintended use. A major part of the problem lies with the operating system running on these devices, which by its nature is reconfigurable and open for internal and external communications. Per Buer,… Read more →
(Image: Getty Images/iStockphoto) The director of privacy at the Australian Digital Health Agency (ADHA), which runs the My Health Record system, resigned last month over privacy concerns, according to a report by Fairfax Media. While the director, Nicole Hunt, declined to comment, two sources close to her “confirmed that she had left the business out of frustration that privacy and… Read more →
SAP said it will buy Qualtrics International for $8 billion in cash as it tries to blend experience management with its operational data. With the move, SAP acquires a company that has a survey platform and focuses on both customer and employee experiences. Qualtrics product suite covers everything from customer analytics to retention to employee engagement and exit interviews. The… Read more →