BlackBerry just confirmed to us the target pricing of its upcoming QWERTY smartphone in the US, and the quick takeaway is that keyboards don't come cheap. According to company representatives, the Q10 is intended to be sold for $249 on a two-year contract, which positions it as more expensive than the Galaxy S 4, iPhone 5, One and Z10.
Today Samsung confirmed some of the details about the Galaxy S4‘s carrier footprint that leaked out earlier this week. Just as with the Galaxy S3, the S4 will be available on all of the major carriers – AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, Verizon Wireless – plus three of the next biggest networks. U. S. Cellular, Cricket, and C Spire also get the phone at launch. The Samsung press release didn’t offer all the pricing and availability details, but it was quickly followed up by announcements from the carriers themselves.
Cyber threats are the number one type of danger facing the United States, according to US national intelligence director James Clapper, the man in charge of coordinating the CIA and the NSA, among many other agencies. "As more and more state and nonstate actors gain cyber expertise, its importance and reach as a global threat cannot be overstated," Clapper said in testimony he gave to the House Intelligence Committee last week, as part of his office's annual global threat assessment report.
Google is fighting back against National Security Letter, the secretive, controversial form of datarequest for data from the US government that bypasses the court process and comes with a gag order. The company has filed papers in a case called In Re Google Inc. Petition to set aside Legal Process; while the documents are sealed, Bloomberg reported on the nature of the filing. No details are currently available on the request itself, but the move is significant — Google would be the most prominent company yet to challenge an NSL.
Whether you’re designing a website for a certain up-and-coming personality or just doing some Photoshop or Illustrator projects for kicks, you can never underestimate the power of color schemes in finding the right colors for your project.
There are so many sources for combination of colors for a specific project. For starters, you can just look out of your window and see which colors look good in your eyes and which ones look revolting when combined; nature can be a good source of inspiration. However, there are more sophisticated tools in choosing the right color combinations, like the products offered by Pantone, where you can easily see which colors look good when juxtaposed. But if you are looking for other places to look for color schemes, here are some tips.
BlackBerry has now issued a statement confirming that its relationship is still on with the Department of Defense — for its sake hopefully closing the loop on the story that started with reports that the DoD would be dumping its deal with the troubled Canadian handset maker, once a mainstay of business users, who are now migrating to Apple and Android devices. BlackBerry says that its devices and services are in the so-called Security Requirement Guide approval state right now, as are others, and BlackBerry will be the first to come out of it.
BlackBerry says that it’s getting approval for BB10 devices, the PlayBook and the on-device enterprise services that it runs on these, with that expected to come in early April.
The community around Bitcoin, the fast-growing virtual currency that sustains an economy worth more than $650 million, has been shaken by what seems to be the first government response to its phenomenal rise. Yesterday the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), a bureau of the US Treasury Department, published some guidelines for how virtual currencies should be regulated — and it says many Bitcoin businesses need to register with the US government.
After mulling over its response for a day, the Bitcoin Foundation — the closest thing the decentralized currency has to a spokesperson — has released a statement condemning the rules. "I’m a little disheartened that FinCEN appears to be creating an entirely new regulatory scheme under the guise of 'guidance,'" wrote Patrick Murk, adding that compliance would be "infeasible for many, if not most members of the Bitcoin community."
BlackBerry’s first BlackBerry 10 smartphone is about to make its official U.S. consumer debut in just a few days, and the long wait has seen the size of the platform’s app selection swell considerably. According to an interview with BlackBerry CEO Thorsten Heins conducted by the Australian Financial Review, Heins expects the BlackBerry World content portal to cross the 100,000 app mark in time for the company’s big Z10 smartphone launch later this week.
It’s a notable (if not entirely significant — there’s an argument for quality over quantity) milestone, and one that BlackBerry may be trying to highlight ahead of its fiscal Q4 2013 earnings release on March 28. That’s a sizable jump from the roughly 70,000 apps that debuted along with BlackBerry 10, but the platform still needs support from big-name developers and services if it wants to pose a credible threat to Apple and Google’s mobile hegemony.
The White House is talking tougher in its growing public conflict with China over cyber attacks on American businesses, which have reportedly been linked back to hackers operating within China's boundaries. On Monday, Tom Donilon, the US national security advisor to President Obama, gave a lengthy address to the Asia Society in New York City, delivering the White House's sternest warning yet to China that the US could retaliate against suspected Chinese cyber attacks if and when it sees fit.
"Increasingly, US businesses are speaking out about their serious concerns about sophisticated, targeted theft of confidential business information and proprietary technologies through cyber intrusions emanating from China on an unprecedented scale," Donilon said in his prepared remarks posted on The White House website. "The international community cannot afford to tolerate such activity from any country. As the President said in the State of the Union, we will take action to protect our economy against cyber threats."
BlackBerry’s new Z10 device will go on sale with AT&T Inc. (T) on March 22 as the Canadian smartphone maker seeks a sales recovery in its biggest market, according to two people familiar with the plan.
The touch-screen phone will begin appearing in U.S. stores that day, said the people, who asked not to be named because no release date has been announced.
BlackBerry, which gets about one-fifth of revenue from the U.S., is counting on the Z10 to revive its brand’s appeal against more popular rivals led by Apple Inc. (AAPL)’s iPhone. While the device has won praise from U.S. technology critics and will have already debuted in 21 countries at the end of this week, American consumers have had to wait because their carriers have longer testing periods for phones.
North Korea amplified its threatening rhetoric as the U.N. Security Council approved new sweeping sanctions, vowing to launch a first-strike nuclear attack against the United States and threatening to engulf Washington in a "sea of fire."
An unidentified spokesman for Pyongyang's Foreign Ministry said the North will exercise its right for "a preemptive nuclear attack to destroy the strongholds of the aggressors" because Washington is pushing to start a nuclear war against the North.
At a mass rally in Pyongyang on Thursday, Army Gen. Kang Pyo Yong told the crowd that North Korea is ready to fire long-range nuclear-armed missiles at Washington.
"Intercontinental ballistic missiles and various other missiles, which have already set their striking targets, are now armed with lighter, smaller and diversified nuclear warheads and are placed on a standby status," Kang said. "When we shell (the missiles), Washington, which is the stronghold of evils, .... will be engulfed in a sea of fire."
Today at the RSA cybersecurity conference, the White House’s cybersecurity leader Michael Daniel stated that the United States has a range of options under consideration for responding to cyber incursions.
According to The Hill’s Jennifer Martinez, the list of possible actions includes “financial sanctions, visa restrictions and military action.” TNW parses that as meaning that no method of possible deterrence has been removed from possibility. This is the proverbial ‘all options on the table’ moment.
Cybersecurity, long a simmering issue in American politics and policy, has reached a new plane of intensity following both first-hands reports by media and technology companies of hacking, but also a report by Mandiant, a security firm, published in the New York Times that indicated that a Chinese military unit was committing aggressive acts of hacking that infringed on American corporate interests and infrastructure points.
That report was corroborated in no small way recently when Senator Dianne Feinstein stated the following: “I read the Mandiant report. I’ve also read other reports, classified out of Intelligence, and I think the Mandiant Report, which is now unclassified, it’s public, is essentially correct.”
The recent rash of hacking attacks shows no sign of slowing — Apple today announced it had fallen victim to the trend — but the US government is preparing some measures to help address the situation. The Associated Press is reporting that the White House will release a new strategy tomorrow, outlining penalties, fines, and trade restrictions designed to deter countries from participating in such efforts.
In November, mobile app services company Flurry announced that China was on track to top the U.S. and Android install base at some point in the first quarter of 2013. Today, Flurry says that has happened. China has passed the U.S. to become the world’s top country for active Android and iOS smartphones and tablets, a year after the country became the fastest-growing smart device market in the world.
For its report, Flurry sourced from its entire data set of over 2.4 billion anonymous, aggregated app session daily across over 275,000 applications around the world. The company says it reliably measures activity in over 90 percent of the world’s smart devices.
In January of this year, the U.S. and China were neck-and-neck in terms of their active smart device installed base, at 222 million and 221 million, respectively. By the end of this month, Flurry estimates that will change to 230 million in the U.S. and 246 million in China.
More importantly, the U.S. will not regain the lead after this shift occurs, due the size of China’s population (over 1.3 billion people vs. 310 million in the U.S.). In fact, the report notes, the only other country that could eventually challenge China is India, which has just over 1.2 billion people. But China’s smart device installed base is significantly larger than India’s, where today there are only 19 million active devices.
It's possible to love your job and get a good salary too: you just have to work for the right company.
The first annual list of the best employers In America by PayScale and Business Insider evaluates companies by both pay and happiness.
The winner is a company you've probably never heard of: a New Jersey biopharmaceutical company called Celgene Corporation. Many of the best companies were also in the health care industry.
The famously indulgent tech industry also did well on this list, including Google (#2), Yahoo (#8), and Microsoft (#14).
Companies in the 2012 Fortune 500 were ranked using PayScale's salary and survey database. Happiness represented 57 percent of the final score and was measured through questions about satisfaction, feelings of meaningfulness, stress, and schedule flexibility. Pay represented 43 percent of the final score and was measured by looking at median pay after five years and pay compared to industry peers.
Over the next few years the U.S. Cyber Command, an army of 900 military personnel and civilians who monitor and defend against cyber attacks, is set to grow by 4,000 cyber soldiers. The command will expand its role in national defense by becoming a new kind of fighting force, one that protects the Internet safety of the entire country. As the expansion is implemented, Cybercom will be separated into three teams:
National Mission Forces
Combat Mission Forces
Cyber Protection Forces
You know Google is huge.
Facebook, too.
You probably remember Yahoo.
Amazon is massive, of course.
And oh yeah, eBay!
But we bet you can't name the other 15 biggest Internet Web sites … in order.
We can, thanks to ComScore, which provided us data on December 2012's most popular Web domains in the US.
Hactivist group Anonymous has hacked the website of the U.S. Sentencing Commission in the name of Aaron Swartz, threatening to leak sensitive government documents if the feds don't reform the justice system, CNET reports.
The collective posted a manifesto regarding "Operation Last Resort," along with a set of encrypted files that it claims have "enough fissile material for multiple warheads."
Anonymous won't specify the contents of the files at issue but said it would start leaking the documents, with heavy redactions, to one media outlet "at a regular interval commencing today," according to CNET.
Hacktivist group Anonymous took over the United States Sentencing Service's website earlier today to announce its intention to expose government secrets in response to the US Department of Justice's treatment of Aaron Swartz. The group says Swartz's indictment was a "twisted and distorted perversion of justice," and claims to have hacked government organizations in retaliation. Anonymous hasn't revealed the nature of the "sensitive" information it's uncovered, but says that "everyone has secrets, and some things are not meant to be public." It's gathered all the information into a "warhead:" a file called U S - D O J - L E A - 2013 . A E E 256.
It was science fiction before, but now it's really happening, Young Skywalker: The US Navy and Air Force are going to install liquid-cooled, solid-state lasers in combat airplanes. Laser turrets designed to defend the planes by shooting incoming threats like surface-to-air missiles and rockets. Seriously. The above is an official concept image by DARPA, but integration is happening this year, with real firing tests coming in 2014.
The USAF has been playing with lasers in planes for a while. They worked to create the the highly successful—but ultimately shelved—Boeing YAL-1 Airborne Laser Testbed. Remember Reagan's Star Wars? This was one of the few technologies that we got to work outside those 3D animations that scared the Soviets so much.
