Your Smartphone Is A Hacker Paradise

Apple's iPhone is often touted as being more "secure" than Google's Android equivalents because it has a tightly managed ecosystem. Apple's careful not to let malicious apps into its App Store, from where they could worm their way into devices. It turns out that the update dealt with a single loophole uncovered by Trustwave Spiderlabs' Nick Percoco and team, and Apple worked fast to solve it because as holes go, it was gaping. To get a certificate, a website offering this type of security has to officially request one from a trusted certificate authority, and the certificate is crafted to have the identity of the website built into it. Percoco's team decided to test iOS devices with the same kind of hack that a malicious coder could use to break SSL.

20th Century Fox to launch movies on Android devices

Twentieth Century Fox is set to allow Android smartphone and tablet owners to view the studio's Blu-ray movies on their mobile devices.

The move will see movies 'side loaded' via an Android application in a launch due in the US, UK, Germany and France this October.

The Blu-ray movie to be made available on Android devices is to be "X-Men: First Class"

"Given its strong growth as a mobile operating system, the support for Android is an important move for us because it further enhances Blu-ray discs as the best way to get your movies to all your screens," Fox marketing veep Vincent Marcais told the Financial Times.

It's not known if Fox will make digital copies of movies for sale separately from Blu-ray discs.

Toshiba Thrive Vs. Apple iPad 2

Toshiba Corp. entered the tablet race by releasing its 10.1-inch Android tablet, the Toshiba Thrive, on July 10. However, the tablet has to deal with the iconic Apple iPad 2, as the benchmark for design and performance has been set by the Cupertino giant.

Thrive comes in only Wi-Fi version and boasts of a 10.1-inch LED backlit multi-touch wide-screen display (1280x800 pixel resolution), Android Honeycomb 3.1 OS and NVIDIA Tegra 2 dual-core processor.

Thrive also has features like a virtual keyboard with Swype technology, a gyroscope, an accelerometer, USB 2.0 and HDMI ports, and an SD card slot. The tablet offers multitasking, zippy Web browsing, console-quality gaming (thanks to ultra-low power NVIDIA GeForce GPU) and hardware-accelerated Flash.

Microsoft's Windows Faces Erosion, Competition

Microsoft's long-running Windows franchises faces the twin threats of softening PC sales and consumers' rising preference for mobile offerings such as Apple’s iOS.

Microsoft’s July 21 earnings call revealed one little tidbit that could have executives in Redmond reaching for the anti-anxiety medication: revenue for the company’s Windows and Windows Live Division declined 1 percent during the most recent quarter, even as other divisions reported significant growth.

It’s hard to understate the importance of Windows revenue to Microsoft’s overall fortunes. Windows 7 has sold some 400 million licenses since its October 2009 release. A galaxy of manufacturing partners and third-party vendors depend on the operating system to help sell their own products and services. And Microsoft needs those truckloads of Windows revenue to help finance less profitable initiatives, such as its “all in” cloud strategy.

Microsoft in limelight

Microsoft announced on Wednesday its annual sales and it seems that the company is ahead of a record. The annual amount is 69,94 billion dollars.

The services and the features that got the company this record on the sales department were the video console Xbox 360 and the Office package. The gross profit of the biggest software manufacturer in the world raised in the last year with 23 percent, at 23,15 billion dollars.

Microsoft’s earnings passed the expert’s expectations, according to BBC. In the last trimester, the profits got to 5,87 billion dollars.

Microsoft sales raised with eight percents, at 17,37 billion dollars, because the demand for Office, Xbox and the software technology for cloud computing were very high.

The Business department of Microsoft that is in charge with the Office package (Word, Outlook, SharePoint, and Excel) had the best sales in the last trimester.

The numbers raised with seven percent at 5,8 billion dollars. The online services division, that administrates the searching engine Bing and the internet website MSN, had also a raise of 16,5 percent of the sales at 662 million dollars.

The losses on this segment got though to 728 dollars, as a consequence of the domination from the main rival Google. A weak point for Microsoft was also the Windows operational system, where the sales had a dramatic fallen, because of the tablet PC demand that is improving from one month to another and this way, the computer market has a lot to suffer and the main sign of the tablet’s domination is the falling of the operational systems.

On Wednesday, the microchip manufacturer Intel announced that the PC sales were weaker that the initial expectations.

Microsoft will go through the tablet market next year, when they will launch the new operational system Windows 8, that will be compatible with the low frequency microchips that are usually used in the tablet devices or on Smartphone.

Microsoft is joining this way the group of the companies that had incomes way over the initial expectations in the last period, formed by Google, Apple and IBM. The experts had bad predictions about the Windows decay for some time.

The famous investor Roger McNamee said in an interview for CNBC that Windows is on dying and more, the Microsoft sales on this segment are a dead business. He said all these thinks because in his opinion, Microsoft Windows is in a point in which it can’t grow anymore. 

source: newsinbox.net

The iPad Trumps Android Tablets At The Office

Huge news! The iPad is trumping Android tablets in the enterprise! Actually this is rather small news and could probably be assumed by just about anyone who knows what they’re talking about. Either way, the smarty arties at Good Technology kindly mapped out the stats sans assumption.

Tablets made up 27 percent of Good Technology’s mobile device activations (the network includes 49 of the Fortune 100 companies and 182 of the Fortune 500 companies), and of those activations, more than 95 percent were iPads.

Apple deals massive patent blow to HTC, Android in serious trouble

Late yesterday an ITC judge ruled that smartphone maker HTC has infringed two Apple patents, and it seems likely that every single Android device out there infringes the same patents.

The two Apple patents that HTC is infringing are as follows:

• U.S. Patent No. 5,946,647 on a “system and method for performing an action on a structure in computer-generated data.”
• U.S. Patent No. 6,343,263 on a “real-time signal processing system for serially transmitted data.”

This is a very significant development since these two patents are also in dispute between Apple and Motorola and Apple and Nokia. This decision is also landmark in that it is the first legal judgement that finds Android in infringement of third-party intellectual property rights.

Just how serious is this ruling for HTC? Very serious. The worst-case scenario is that the ITC imposes an US import ban against all of HTC’s Android products. That’s how serious this is for HTC.

According to intellectual property activist Florian Mueller, Apple is unlikely to grant HTC a license for these patents and might make a damages claim.

But it gets worse. This also has severe implications for all Android products on the market, irrespective of the maker, as Mueller also pointed out:

It’s hard to see how any Android device could not infringe them, or how companies could work around them.

Mueller has put together a chart showing how all Android devices infringe the same patents that HTC has been found infringe.

HTC claims that is has found ‘alternate solutions‘ to these patents, but Mueller isn’t optimistic:

But can those patents really be worked around? Standing in front of the Great Wall of China, you can also vow to walk around it. That doesn’t mean it’s a viable option.

And it seems that it is going to get worse as Android is at the center of 49 federal and ITC infringement suits.

This is serious stuff.

Source: www.zdnet.com