Category : Software News

Chitika reports share bump for Apple iPad competitors Kindle Fire, Galaxy Nexus and Samsung Galaxy.

Web traffic on Android tablets from various vendors grew substantially after the Christmas holiday, cutting the iPad’s share by more than 7%.

Nonetheless, Web traffic on Apple’s iPad continues to outdistance the competition overall, now accounting for nearly 79% of all Web page impressions, according to data compiled by Chitika Insights.

Chitika, which runs Web-based ad network., said its findings are based on hundreds of millions of ad impressions from Dec. 1 to Dec. 27.

Chitika found that the iPad’s share of tablet Web traffic declined by 7.1 percentage points — from 86% to 78.9% — after Christmas Day, 2012.

Kindle Fire had the largest share of the Android tablets, at 7.51%, up 3 percentage points since Christmas. The Samsung Galaxy tablets (7-in. And 10-in.) hold a 4.3% share, up 1.38 percentage points since Christmas, while the share of Web traffic on Google Nexus (7-in. and 10-in.) devices has doubled to 2% since Dec. 25.

Meanwhile, Apple’s iPhone 5 maintains the largest share of smartphone Web traffic — 8.27%. The iPhone is followed by the Samsung Galaxy S III smartphone, which holds a 4.29% share of Web traffic.

Chitika said the tablet results mark “substantial change [which] underscores the inroads non-iPad tablets made this holiday season.”

But Chitika also said that iPad’s share of tablet traffic is likely to return to the 80% range as users return from vacation and browse less frequently on their new Android devices.

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The Serial ATA International Organization (SATA-IO)

Thursday announced that the ratification process has started for SATA Express, which standardizes PCI Express (PCIe) as an interface for client storage.

The specification is now under review by SATA-IO members. It’s expected to be available for review by the general public later this year.

The specification will define new device and motherboard connectors that support both new SATA Express and current SATA devices.

The SATA Express starndard utilizes a new connector defined by SATA-IO to enable a device with a PCIe interface to be in a hard disk drive form-factor. “So while such a PCIe device operates with PCIe protocol and signaling, the host would need a SATA Express host connector to connect to the PCIe device,” said Paul Wassenberg, SATA-IO Marketing Workgroup Chair.

Additionally, the SATA-IO specs define a SATA Express host as able to support either PCIe or SATA devices (drives), Wassenberg added.

SATA Express enables a client storage ecosystem that can include both SATA and PCIe protocols.

The new spec will be particularly useful in opening up bandwidth for new solid-state and hybrid drives, which are already pushing up against the limits of current SATA interfaces with I/O, SATA-IO said.

“This industry-wide effort has made a new level of performance available to client applications and enables connectivity to SATA Express enterprise hosts via the SFF-8639 multifunction connector,” said SATA-IO president Mladen Luksic, in a statement.

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The new group will focus on educating children and seniors about online scams and counterfeits

An Internet safety education campaign will point out scams and other online dangers with an initial target audience of children and seniors.

The new Digital Citizens campaign, launched Thursday, will also strive to shed light on the online sale of counterfeit goods, including prescription drugs, and on pirated Web content, said Tom Galvin, executive director of the new group. Digital Citizens will investigate online scams by showing how people can get fooled — for example, one of the first projects will be to purchase counterfeit drugs from online pharmacies, he said.

Digital Citizens will also attempt to demonstrate the ties of counterfeit products and scams to criminal groups, he said. “There are large criminal enterprises out there,” Galvin said. “What we see is an online Mafia that is spreading out into numerous illegal activities because they see they can make a profit.”

One recent phenomenon the group will highlight is conference scams, where criminals set fake conference events on issues such as global warming and invite people to attend after paying conference or hotel fees, said Garth Bruen, president of spam-fighting service Knujon and a member of Digital Citizens.

Internet users have to make an “immense” effort to keep up with online scams, and one of the goals of the new group is to alert them to new dangers, he said.

It’s important to educate children about online safety, said Teri Schroeder, founder and CEO of i-SAFE, a nonprofit focused on educating children and teens on safe Internet use. Many children and teens don’t understand that their online activities have consequences years later, with some colleges looking at applicants’ online presence, she said.

Among the members of Digital Citizens are members of the Fraternal Order of Police, the National Consumers League and RHD International, a health organization focused on eradicating rheumatic heart disease.

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Violent video games will be among the areas looked at by Vice President Joe Biden

Violence in video games and other aspects of pop culture in the U.S. will be among the areas examined as part of an investigation aimed at reducing gun violence in the country.

The investigation, headed by U.S. Vice President Joe Biden, has been charged with producing proposals no later than the end of January on legislative action the government could take as it seeks to reduce gun violence. Biden’s work comes in reaction to the shocking killing last week of 26 people — most of them small children — at a school in Newtown, Connecticut.

“When it comes to cultural matters, that’s an area that bears exploration and is one of the areas that the president hopes will be a topic of the conversation that he wants to undertake,” said Jay Carney, the White House press secretary, at a televised press briefing on Thursday when asked by a reporter if the study would include pop culture.

As the years have progressed and video gaming has become more popular and more realistic, the games have become increasingly violent. Several of the best-selling video games involve players carrying sophisticated and powerful weaponry that’s used to kill on-screen opponents.

One of the most popular franchises — Activision’s Call of Duty — recently launched a new edition of the game and rang up sales of $1 billion in 16 days.

But there’s no simple link between such violent games and what happened in Newtown and other mass shootings in the U.S. While investigations into such shootings often uncover a possible influence from video games, violent movies or gun ownership, millions of people enjoy these things without turning violent.

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The music service was previously sued for offering links to pirated songs

Yahoo’s music service for China will close in January, after once being accused of supporting music piracy.

The music service posted a notice on its site, thanking users for their support, and stating that it was adjusting its product strategy. The music service will shut down on Jan. 20.

Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group, which runs Yahoo’s China operations as part of a $1 billion deal with the U.S. company back in 2005, declined to elaborate on the music service’s closure.

The service, which offers third-party links to searched songs, previously garnered criticism for allegedly supporting pirated music downloads . In 2007, the International Federation of the Phonographic IndustryA sued Yahoo’s China operations for copyright infringement. A Beijing court later ruled against Yahoo and fined it about $27,000 in damages.

China’s online music industry has since changed. The country’s largest search engine, Baidu had also been criticized for offering links to pirated songs. But last year, the company signed licensing deals with major record labels, and also launched a new site offering free legal music downloads to users.

Yahoo’s China site has also never been able to gain a major following in the country, said Duncan Clark, chairman of technology consultancy BDA China. “It’s basically irrelevant,” he said. After Yahoo’s deal to hand over its China operations to Alibaba Group, the U.S. company has since become a passive investor in the market, he added.

“They never really cracked the market, and nobody has really,” Clark said, pointing to how U.S. Internet companies have failed to attain the same success in China as they have in their home country.

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Just 12 light years away, planet is one of five found orbiting Sun-like star Tau Ceti

A nearby Sun-like star is host to a planet that may be capable of supporting life, according to an international group of astronomers.

The planet is one of five orbiting one of the closest Sun-like stars to Earth, Tau Ceti. It’s in a so-called “habitable zone,” the region around a star where it’s possible for a planet to have enough pressure to maintain liquid water on its surface.

Tau Ceti is 12 light years from Earth and visible to the naked eye in the evening sky.

“This discovery is in keeping with our emerging view that virtually every star has planets, and that the galaxy must have many such potentially habitable Earth-sized planets,” said Steve Vogt, a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Tau Ceti’s five planets are estimated to have masses between two and six times that of Earth, making it the lowest-mass planetary system yet detected. The planet that lies in its habitable zone has a mass about five times that of Earth’s.

“Tau Ceti is one of our nearest cosmic neighbors and so bright that we may be able to study the atmospheres of these planets in the not-too-distant future,” said James Jenkins of the Universidad de Chile and a member of the astronomy team.

“The Earth isn’t unique, nor the center of the universe,” said Geoff Marcy, professor of astronomy at the University of California, Berkeley, in an earlier interview. “The diversity of other worlds is greater than depicted in all the science fiction novels and movies. Aristotle would be proud of us for answering some of the most profound philosophical questions about our place in the universe.”

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Banks are likely to be better protected against this wave of attacks, Arbor Networks researchers say

Some of the distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks that targeted the websites of U.S. financial institutions this week have peaked at 60 Gbps, according to researchers from DDoS mitigation provider Arbor Networks.

A group calling itself “Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Cyber Fighters” launched a series of DDoS attacks against the websites of several U.S. banks during September and October, severely disrupting online and mobile banking services for extended periods of time. The group claimed that the attacks were in response to a controversial film trailer mocking the prophet Muhammad not being removed from YouTube.

On Dec. 10, the same group announced that a new wave of attacks would start this week and target U.S. Bancorp, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, PNC Financial Services Group and SunTrust Banks. In a post on Pastebin, the group said this second phase of the operation would involve more widespread attacks.

“Some of this week’s attacks have been as large as 60 Gbps,” researchers from Arbor Networks said Tuesday in a blog post. The average rate for attacks in September was 1.67 Gbps, with a peak for that month of 63.3 Gbps, according to figures from Arbor.

That said, the attacks are not that much different from the ones in September and October, according to Dan Holden, head of Arbor’s security engineering and response team. There are some changes in the tools being used, but they are not significant, he said.

The attackers are using a new version of a tool called Brobot — one of the primary tools used in the first set of the attacks — and the main addition seems to be a new attack method that uses specially crafted DNS packets. However, this is a known technique and from an Arbor standpoint, there should be no problem defending against it, Holden said.

He believes that in general the banks and their providers are better prepared to defend against DDoS attacks now than they were two months ago. Even if some of the websites are affected, it will be less so than it was in September and October, he said.

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Government’s forecast for next 15 to 20 years gives tech a big role; including big data, robotics, smart cities and anarchic social networks

After each presidential election, the government’s top intelligence experts release a report about the future of the world.

It’s always a best seller.

The Global Trends 2030: Alternative Worlds document, released this week by the U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), is already the number one seller in Amazon’s international relations category and ranked number two among political books sold on the retail site.

It ranks 1,412nd overall on Amazon’s best seller list for all categories.

Unlike many government reports, the 160-page Global Trends report is written for a broad audience. Its descriptive style is a combination of Tom Clancy, NPR News and Foreign Affairs. It even quotes Charles Dickens.

The Kindle edition of the report is available for $1.99 on Amazon, but can be downloaded for free as a PDF on the DNI website.

By 2030, Asia “will have surpassed the North America and Europe combined in terms of global power, based upon GDP, population size, military spending and technological investment, the report said.

“China alone will probably have the largest economy, surpassing that of the United States a few years before 2030,” the report said.

The report also includes the colorfully labeled wild card category of “Black Swans,” which are “discrete events” with the potential for major impact.

The “Black swans” include climate change. “Dramatic and unforeseen changes

already are occurring at a faster rate than expected,” and could cause regional food supply issues.

There could be a pandemic that kills millions, nuclear terror or a cyberattack by 2030.

And if those things weren’t enough to worry about, there’s a potential for a solar geomagnetic storm powerful enough to disrupt the electric grid, knock out satellites, and many sensitive electronic devices.”

y 2030, it’s possible that quantum computing may begin to have an impact, the report said.

In terms of social networks, the government gives its due to Facebook but says its “continued dominance during the next 15-20 years (or even the next five) is not guaranteed.”

Social networks of the future “may not even be formal organizations, but rather anarchic collectives built on sophisticated variants of peer-to-peer file sharing technologies.”

Another tech trend is the development of “smart cities,” or the ability to use advanced IT capabilities in all aspects of urban management.

Robotics and 3D printing “have the potential to change work patterns in both developing and developed words.” They could make technologies could make semi-skilled manufacturing workers in developing economies “redundant.”

By 2030, robots “could eliminate the need for human labor entirely in some manufacturing environments with total automation become more cost effective than outsourcing manufacturing to developing economies,” according this intelligence report.

This latter point may get an early illustration via Apple as it begins manufacturing one of its Mac lines in the U.S. That plant is expected to be heavily robotic.

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Tablet sales skyrocketing

The latest predictions from researcher IDC show a continuing increase in tablet sales from the end of 2012 all the way through 2016, according to the company’s latest Worldwide Quarterly Tablet Tracker.

IDC raised its estimate for the total number of tablets to be sold worldwide in 2012 from 117.5 million to 122.3 million in today’s release, on the basis of strong demand for the Apple iPad mini and growing Android sales numbers. The company also raised its 2013 prediction from 165.9 million units to 172.4 million, and its 2016 figure from 261.4 million to 282.7 million.

“Android tablets are gaining traction in the market thanks to solid products from Google, Amazon, Samsung, and others. And Apple’s November iPad mini launch, along with its surprise refresh of the full-sized iPad, positions the company well for a strong holiday season,” said IDC tablet research director Tom Mainelli in a statement.

Nevertheless, the relative market shares of the two leading platforms will both decrease slightly as time goes by, according to IDC. By 2016, the company’s researchers said, Android and iOS will both surrender minor amounts of market share to Windows, which will account for 10.3% of sales at that time.

Email Jon Gold at jgold@nww.com and follow him on Twitter at @NWWJonGold.

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The service will allow short video messages to be sent between subscribers

Skype hasn’t officially confirmed rumors of a video messaging service that’s supposed to be coming to its platform, but an update to its terms of service on Wednesday did the job.

The video messaging service was first reported in September as a feature that would allow Skype users to send short, pre-recorded messages to other Skype users.

On Wednesday, Skype updated its terms of use to include video messaging.

The update reveals that unlimited video messaging will be offered to users of the Skype Premium service. That service costs $8.99 per month, although customers can get discounts with a three-month or one-year contract.

“If you are a Skype Premium subscriber you can … send and receive an unlimited number of Video Messages and any Video Messages you send and/or receive shall have no expiry date,” the terms of service read.

“As a non-Skype Premium subscriber any Video Message you send or receive will expire within 90 days, except for Video Messages received from a Skype Premium subscriber or where you upgrade to a Skype Premium subscription before the 90 day expiry period ends, and in either case the Video Message shall cease to have an expiry date.”

Skype did not respond to several requests for comment.

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