Google Employee Details Stolen In Burglary

Records kept at Colt Express Outsourcing Services, an external company used by Google and other companies to handle human-resources functions, were stolen in a burglary on 26 May.

An undisclosed number of employees’ details and those of dependents, such as names, addresses, and social security numbers, were on the stolen computers. It is understood that Colt did not employ encryption to protect the information.

It is still unclear how many more of Colt Express’s clients were affected by the breach. US employees of CNET Networks (publisher of ZDNet.co.uk) were also affected by the burglary, with around 6,500 employees’ details stolen.

News Source: ZDNet UK
View: Full Story

AMD Radeon HD 4870 X2 Ready By August

Following the recent launch of the ATI Radeon HD 4850 and 4870 GPUs, AMD plans to introduce the high-end dual-GPU HD 4870 X2 by the end of July, according to sources at graphics card vendors.

Evaluation samples are schedule to be available in mid-July, and AMD will begin shipping reference design boards with 2GB GDDR5 memory at the end of the month, the sources detailed.

News Source: DigiTimes
View: Full Story

Hitachi Aiming For 5TB Hard Drive By 2010

Solid-state disks may be eating into the territory of traditional hard drives, particularly in laptops, but that doesn’t mean spinning platters are on their last legs – particularly not at Hitachi.

Hard drive specialist Hitachi Global Storage Technologies is continuing to push HDDs to the limit, with a strong emphasis on increasing capacity and with a clear goal in mind.

News Source: TechRadar
View: Full Story

Firefox 3 Download Record Official

Mozilla has officially made history with a new Guinness world record for the largest number of software downloads in a 24-hour period.

The final record breaking 8,002,530 downloads for web browser Firefox 3.0 took place in June.

“The enthusiasm and creativity of Firefox fans was key to making this happen,” said marketing head Paul Kim.

Gareth Deaves of Guinness World Records called it “an extremely impressive accomplishment”.

News Source: BBC News
View: Full Story

Critical Flaws Open Up Firefox 2.0x To Attack

Secunia researchers detected numerous security vulnerabilities in the Mozilla Firefox 2.0x Web browser, many of which enable malicious attackers to hack into vulnerable systems and either shut down or take complete control of a user’s computer.

Researchers at Secunia, a Copenhagen, Denmark-based security company specializing in vulnerability assessment and management, issued a security advisory Wednesday, warning users of multiple errors they deemed “highly critical.”

If exploited, the critical vulnerabilities could potentially allow remote attackers to conduct cross-site scripting and spoofing attacks, bypass security restrictions, disclose sensitive or system information, potentially compromise a user’s system, access a user’s system or launch a denial of service attack, according to the advisory.

News Source: CRN
View: Full Story

First Look: Mozilla Weave 0.2 Puts Firefox In The Cloud

Mozilla Labs has announced the availability of Weave 0.2, the third major release of its experimental Firefox synchronization add-on. This version brings a broader feature set, improved reliability, and streamlined notification support. Although it is still in the early testing stage, Weave is already effective and easy to use.

When Mozilla launched Weave in December, the add-on offered basic support for storing the user’s Firefox bookmarks and history in the cloud, allowing the synchronization of the data between computers. The latest version extends this functionality to also cover cookies, passwords, tabs, and form contents. Future versions will go further and also support synchronizing the user’s extensions, themes, and search plugins. Mozilla intends to eventually implement an API that will enable third-party Firefox extensions to leverage Weave’s synchronization capabilities for other kinds of user data.

News Source: Ars Technica
View: Full Story

Microsoft Issues Vista Warning

Microsoft is encouraging its partners to do more to help SMEs purchase the most appropriate version of Windows Vista.

The software giant claims that 60 per cent of UK SMEs will potentially buy the wrong operating system for their needs in its next fiscal year, which it highlighted as a key concern at its recent quarterly partner briefing.

It estimated that 2.6 million PCs will be refreshed in the SME space over the next 12 months.

News Source: CRN
View: Full Story

Use Microsoft To Win Apple Products

Microsoft is dangling prizes made by arch-nemesis Apple to entice Australian web surfers to give its online search products a second chance.

Through its local joint venture with the Nine Network, ninemsn, Microsoft recently completed a full revamp of Live Search to improve results and integrate video, images, news and maps into search queries.

But in what is perhaps a sign of desperation given Google’s growing market share dominance, ninemsn is running a new Live Search promotion - Secret Search - offering surfers the chance to win prizes including the iPod Nano, Shuffle and Touch just for conducting searches.

News Source: The Age
View: Full Story

Microsoft Seeks Allies For New Yahoo Move: Report

Microsoft Corp is preparing a new bid for Yahoo Inc’s search business and has approached other media companies about joining it in a deal that would effectively lead to Yahoo’s breakup, the Wall Street Journal said.

Microsoft has already held talks with Time Warner Inc and News Corp, among others, the newspaper quoted people familiar with the discussions as saying.

The talks are preliminary and unlikely to result in a deal with Yahoo, the paper said.

News Source: Reuters
View: Full Story

Gartner Says Webmail Cuts Costs For SMEs

Businesses with less than 1000 staff should consider replacing in-house e-mail servers with webmail to reduce the cost of providing e-mail for end users, analyst firm Gartner has advised.

Matthew Cain, research vice-president at Gartner, said companies with fewer than 1,000 seats would gain significantly from the webmail approach.

Geographically dispersed organisations and those that required less than 99% uptime should also consider the webmail model to simplify support and improve uptime, he said.

News Source: ComputerWeekly
View: Full Story