Web content filtering company Netsweeper has supplied its products to Pakistan, even as some top IT companies have refused to supply gear for a controversial filtering project, a Canadian research group has disclosed.

The new report released Thursday by Citizen Lab, based at the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto, finds that Pakistan is actively filtering content, with Netsweeper filtering devices actively used to censor content on an ISP-wide level in Pakistan.

The Canadian company has supplied its filtering products to the Pakistan Telecommunication Company, which is Pakistan's largest telecommunications company and also operates the Pakistan Internet Exchange Point. The operator did not immediately return calls for comment.

"The fact that Pakistan has deployed the Netsweeper filtering technology at the national Internet Exchange level is a significant development giving the potential of extending Internet censorship to lower-level ISPs in the country," the report said.

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France's data protection authority has given Google three months to change the way it handles users' private data, or face legal sanctions.

The order, made on June 10 and published Thursday, is the result of a formal investigation begun by the French National Commission on Computing and Liberty (CNIL) in April, after the company repeatedly rejected requests to reverse changes it made to its privacy policy in March 2012.

In its June 10 decision, CNIL ordered Google to clearly explain to users the ways in which data collected about them will be used; to keep data for no longer than is necessary for the purposes it has declared to users; not to combine data from different sources without legal authority; to fairly process data collected from "passive" users of Google's services through DoubleClick and Analytics cookies or Google +1 buttons on the pages they visit; and to obtain informed consent from users before storing cookies in their mobile phone, PC or other terminal.

If it does not comply, Google could face a fine of a maximum of €150,000 (or €300,000 for a second offense), and could in certain circumstances be ordered to refrain from processing personal data in certain ways for a period of three months.

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Electronics manufacturer Foxconn Technology Group is putting yet more effort behind Mozilla's Firefox OS, and plans to hire up to 3,000 people in Taiwan with expertise in HTML5 and cloud computing.

On Thursday, Foxconn said it was looking to hire between 2,000 and 3,000 people in order to bolster its research into software. It's looking for software engineers with skills in HTML5 operating systems, HTML5 apps, and cloud computing, the company said.

Foxconn announced the hiring plan just two weeks after it partnered with Mozilla on its still-fledgling HTML5-based operating system, called Firefox OS. The Taiwanese company is the world's largest contract electronics manufacturer, and wants to provide its customers with an alternative operating system in the rapidly expanding mobile device arena.

Foxconn is developing more than five devices running the Firefox OS for its customers, the company said at Taipei's annual Computex trade show earlier this month. It intends to design Firefox OS reference models that will cover smartphones, tablets, laptops and TVs.

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Paranoia—in small doses—is an excellent preventive medicine. If you think your business is too small to be a target for hackers, identity thieves, and similarly unsavory characters, you’re dangerously underestimating the value of your business.

IT security might seem to be a daunting prospect for a small business without an expert staff, a large budget, or expensive consultants, but you can take a number of easily implemented measures to lock down the personal computers your business relies on. Here are five simple security tips you should implement today.

Encrypt your hard drives

The first step is to implement full-disk encryption on each one of your company’s PCs. This step is crucial because system passwords alone offer no defense against hackers’ accessing the hard drive from another computer, or against someone’s attempts to clone its entire contents for off-site examination. In addition, recovering previously deleted files from an unencrypted storage device or disk image is a relatively trivial matter for an attacker or snoop.

Selectively encrypting sensitive folders or files works, too, but full-disk encryption is the best means of ensuring that every file is protected. Microsoft’s BitLocker is the gold standard for this task, thanks to its ease of use and the fact that it comes standard with the Ultimate and Enterprise versions of Windows 7, and with the Ultimate and Professional versions of Windows 8.

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The Internet is filled with websites that are inappropriate for anyone, much less children. Kids get into trouble online all the time, even when they aren’t looking for it. Misspelling a website address, screwing up a search term, or clicking a risqué ad can lead to some awkward bedtime conversations. Online bullying, predatory adults, and illegal downloading of copyrighted content are other threats.

Though we can’t make the Internet itself kid-safe, we can at least make its darker crevices harder to access. Setting up parental controls and content filtering on computers, tablets, smartphones, and other gadgets is easy. More important, these precautions empower your devices to protect kids from digital dangers when you aren’t around to supervise.

Start with Web filtering

The most effective precaution you can take to safeguard kids while they’re browsing is to set up Web filtering on your router with OpenDNS. You can enable Web filtering on most devices individually, but I recommend trying the free or premium service from OpenDNS because it can filter Internet access across all computers and devices connected to your router.

OpenDNS offers three parental control options: FamilyShield, Home, and Home VIP. OpenDNS FamilyShield, the simplest option, offers preconfigured adult content filtering—just set it on your router and forget it. OpenDNS Home allows you to customize the filtering and security settings. You also need to create an account and install a program on at least one PC in your home. OpenDNS Home VIP, the high-end option, starts at $20 a year and provides additional features such as Internet usage stats and premium support.

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Chip maker Qualcomm is introducing six new processors meant for entry-level phones in China and emerging markets.

The processors are part of Qualcomm's Snapdragon 200 class, a chip line that offers support for lower-end specs compared to the company's Snapdragon 400, 600 and 800 chip series, the company said Thursday.

The six new processors lack support for 4G LTE, but are built for HSPA+ networks, and TD-SCDMA (Time Division Synchronous Code Division Multiple Access), a 3G standard used by China's largest mobile carrier, China Mobile.

The Qualcomm chips will be available to vendors in late 2013. The new processors are built using a 28-nanometer manufacturing process, and feature dual and quad-core CPUs. The chips also have support to handle two, or even three SIM cards, a feature that is popular with consumers in Asia.

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Best Buy has recalled about 5,100 replacement batteries for Apple's MacBook Pro laptops, after 13 reports that the battery caught fire, a U.S. consumer safety agency said.

The ATG lithium-ion batteries can catch fire while charging, the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission said in a statement Wednesday.

The recall covers both black and white ATG lithium-ion replacement batteries for MacBook Pro laptops. "Model number 'MC-MBOOK13B' is on the label of the black battery and model number 'MC-BOOK13W' is on the label of the white battery," CPSC said. The ATG logo is on both batteries.

Best Buy has received 13 reports that the battery caught fire, including one of a serious burn to a consumer's leg, according to CPSC.

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3-D printer company Stratasys is acquiring desktop 3-D printer maker MakerBot for over US$400 million in an all-stock deal, to shore up its consumer presence.

Privately-held MakerBot has sold more than 22,000 3-D printers since it was founded in 2009, and its printers are increasingly used by a class of "prosumers" that includes individuals using the devices for professional purposes as well as for personal applications, Stratasys said in a statement Wednesday.

MakerBot has also set up a portal Thingiverse.com for the sharing of user-generated digital design content to promote system usage. The portal has more than 90,000 3-D product files available for sharing, and generates more than 500,000 unique visitors and 1 million downloads each month, Stratasys said.

In the transaction, Stratasys will initially issue about 4.76 million shares in exchange for 100 percent of the outstanding capital stock of MakerBot in Brooklyn, New York. The proposed merger has an initial value of $403 million based on Stratasys' closing stock price of $84.60 as of Wednesday. MakerBot shareholders are also entitled to performance-based payouts of more shares or cash.

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There was a largely euphoric reaction online in the hours after Microsoft reversed its policies for the upcoming Xbox One game console, which had restricted resales of used games and required a constant Internet connection.

A Facebook message about the changes gained over 75,000 likes in three hours. On gaming forums and sites like Reddit, most hailed the reversal as victory, though some said the incident would still drive them to rival Sony's upcoming PlayStation 4.

But others mourned new cloud-based features that Microsoft will eliminate as part of its policy changes. As originally planned, the new Xbox would have allowed digital games to be shared with ten friends and family, allowing others to log in and play the titles. A cloud-based system also meant that software would be available from any console, even without a physical disc, and downloaded titles could be shared and sold.

"It sounded pretty awesome to me, far better than the current physical media dominated model," wrote a user on Reddit.

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Despite the promise of portability from service providers, the reality of the cloud for big customers is a similar type of lock-in as they experience with on-premise apps vendors such as Oracle and SAP, two CIOs said Tuesday.

"You're kind of locked in -- it's out with the old boss and in with the new," said Ralph Loura, CIO of The Clorox Company, in a discussion about "what keeps CIOs up at night" at the GigaOm Structure conference in San Francisco on Wednesday.

Companies that buy storage and compute services in small increments might not be tied to one provider, but most big companies sign big, multi-year contracts with cloud suppliers that effectively tie them to one platform, he said.

They also train workers for that platform and build applications and interfaces in a "semi-bespoke model" that further ties them down. "I think we're all trying not to get fooled again with this model, and that's one of the things that keeps me up at night," he said.

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With more than a billion monthly active users, it's easy to imagine that most of the data travelling over Facebook's networks is delivering photos, status updates and "likes" to its end users, but that's far from the case.

The social network moves about 1,000 times as much data between the servers inside its data centers as it does from its servers out to end users, company executives said Wednesday. They talked about the challenges that this creates for Facebook and the network technologies it's developing to overcome them.

"Our traffic going from machine to machine far exceeds the traffic going from the machines out to our end users," said Jay Parikh, vice president of Infrastructure Engineering at Facebook, in an on-stage interview at the GigaOm Structure conference in San Francisco.

That's because of all the processing work Facebook does on the back end to figure out what information it needs to send to end users. The systems analyze data, rank results, and perform a myriad of other tasks to generate the pages Facebook delivers to users' smartphones and Web browsers.

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Twitter has bought Spindle, a search technology company that informs users about what's happening with local businesses and organizations around them.

The deal, the terms of which were not disclosed, could help Twitter beef up its efforts to keep users "in the loop." The company has been rumored to be working on its own location discovery feature to surface certain tweets posted by people nearby.

Spindle's technology was based on delivering social updates from businesses and other sources to users. For example, Spindle users could use interactive maps to see where things were happening nearby and also set alerts to receive notifications from specific places.

Spindle, which has been based in Boston, aims to "help people discover valuable social content they couldn't otherwise find," the company says on its website.

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A company that specializes in Google apps is developing a series of enterprise applications for Google Glass that should be available late this year or early 2014.

“We’re in the early stages of developing for Google Glass,” said Dan McNelis, co-founder of Dito, a company that provides services for Google applications.

Google Glass is the wearable device that the search giant announced in 2012. Since then the system has been in beta with developers and will likely be released to the public in late 2013 or early 2014.

McNelis said Dito is developing both “Glassware” or the apps on top of Google’s API (application programming interface), and figuring out specific use cases to develop custom apps for Glass.

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Microsoft and cellphone maker Nokia were in advanced talks about an acquisition of the Finnish company's device business, but the discussions have broken down, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal.

Such a deal might have improved both companies' ability to compete in a world dominated by smartphones offered by Apple, which makes both hardware and software, and by Google, which relies largely on third parties for devices that run its Android OS.

But the talks, which took place as recently as this month, have faltered and aren't likely to be revived, The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday. The discussions were held in London and the companies were close to an oral agreement about a combination, the report said.

The deal hit snags regarding price and the market position of Nokia, which trails far behind both Apple and Samsung, the Journal said.

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A good YouTube app makes it impossible to stop watching videos when what you should be doing is writing that program's review. And this is exactly what happened to me as I attempted to sit down and write about Minitube, a YouTube desktop app that's going to change the way you consume your dose of daily videos. At €9 ($12 on 6/19/13), it's not cheap…but if you spend much time on YouTube, Minitube is well worth the price.

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The traditional clamshell laptop will always be with us, but thanks to the innovation of the Intel-inspired Ultrabook, a wide range of new mobile computer designs has recently hit the market. Offering a vast amount of flexibility, these new designs offer considerable freedom, letting you choose the Ultrabook™ that works best for you.

Here's a guide to the various types of Ultrabook designs you'll find available today.

Standard / Laptop Style

Don't fret if you just want the basics and don't want to reinvent the wheel: Ultrabook systems with a standard clamshell design are widely available. These systems look and operate just like any laptop computer, except they’re often much thinner and lighter.  Also, many now come equipped with touchscreens, so you can use the keyboard and touchpad to navigate Windows, or draw on the screen with your fingertip.

360 Degree Screen

At first these Ultrabook systems appear to be pretty standard, except they're equipped with new hinges that allow the screen to rotate around a full 360 degrees. In other words, you can push the screen back so that it lies flat against the table, and keep going another 180 degrees so that the screen is facing outward from the bottom of the laptop. Next just flip the Ultrabook over so that the keyboard is on the bottom of the machine and the screen is facing you. Presto, you've turned your laptop into a keyboard-free, slate-style tablet.

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Intel has joined the Alliance for Wireless Power (A4WP), a consortium founded by Qualcomm and Samsung, as the chip maker looks to bring wireless charging to tablets and laptops.

Another member of A4WP is Integrated Device Technology, which is developing wireless charging chipsets for laptops, tablets and hybrids running on Intel chips. Intel hopes to make wirelessly charging a smartphone and tablet as easy as putting the device close to a laptop. Intel has dubbed its wireless power offering as Wireless Charging Technology (WCT).

“Although we are not yet giving out timeframes for consumer products with WCT enabled, IDT has stated they will be delivering their full chipset solution for reference design work in early 2013,” Intel representative Dan Snyder said in a blog entry in August last year.

A4WP in January this year released wireless charging specifications based on near-field magnetic resonance technology, in which users can recharge multiple mobile devices without placing them in direct contact with charging pads.

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Microsoft Wednesday announced several new apps that have arrived or will arrive within the Windows Store, including the Vevo app for music videos and an updated version of Where’s My Water?

But if you’re still hoping for a Facebook app for Windows 8, keep waiting.

Really, ever since Windows 8 was released last October, many have wondered when Microsoft—or Facebook—would release an app supporting the over 1 billion users who use the Facebook service.

While many apps—such as Pandora, for example— still haven’t made the transition over to the Windows 8 platform, Facebook seems like a significant omission.

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Intellectual Ventures, a large patent-licensing firm, has filed a second patent-infringement lawsuit against Motorola Mobility while its first patent lawsuit is still pending in a Delaware count.

The patent-licensing firm filed its second lawsuit against Motorola in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida, the company announced Wednesday. The second lawsuit alleges that Motorola, owned by Google, has infringed seven different patents than the six named in the Delaware lawsuit.

Intellectual Ventures “has been unable to reach an agreement with Motorola” in the Delaware case, the company said in a statement.

The company also filed a patent-infringement lawsuit against banking firm Capital One in Virginia, Intellectual Ventures aid.

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Intel said Wednesday that is has joined the board of directors of the Alliance for Wireless Power (A4WP), a consortium developing technology for wirelessly charging electronic devices. However, Intel said last year that Ultrabooks capable of wireless charging would arrive in 2013—a promise the company has yet to make good on.

Virtually all of the major chipmakers have now joined A4WP, a spokesman for the group said, including Broadcom, Qualcomm, and Samsung, among others. A4WP uses near-field magnetic resonance technology to charge a nearby device, like a cell phone, if both the power source and the target device support the technology.

“Intel believes the A4WP specification, particularly the use of near-field magnetic resonance technology, can provide a compelling consumer experience and enable new usage models that make device charging almost automatic,” said Navin Shenoy, vice president, PC client group and general manager, mobile client platform division at Intel, in a statement. “In joining A4WP, we look forward to working alongside other member companies and contributing to standards that help fuel an ecosystem of innovative solutions capable of simultaneously charging a range of devices, from low-power accessories to smartphones, tablets, and Ultrabooks.”

At its Intel Developer Forum last year, the company said that it would add wireless charging capabilities to its Ultrabook platform sometime this year.

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A telephone records surveillance program run by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and National Security Agency raises serious privacy concerns and should be reined in, some U.S. senators said Wednesday.

Some members of the Senate Judiciary Committee pushed for changes to the surveillance program that allows the two agencies to broadly collect telephone call records from U.S. carriers, with some lawmakers calling for the records to remain with carriers until the agencies have a suspicion of a telephone number’s ties to terrorist activity.

“I remain concerned that, as a country, we’ve yet to strike the right balance between intelligence gathering into the FBI and the civil liberties and privacy rights of Americans,” said Senator Patrick Leahy, a Vermont Democrat, during a hearing on oversight of the FBI. “The American people deserve to know how broad investigative laws ... are being interpreted and used to conduct electronic surveillance.”

FBI Director Robert Mueller defended the recently exposed phone records collection program, saying it was a critical piece of antiterrorism investigations. The phone records collection program authorized by the Patriot Act has been a key tool in disrupting 10 to 12 terrorist plots since Sept. 11, 2001, he told lawmakers. NSA officials said Tuesday that the two surveillance programs have helped disrupt more than 50 terrorist plots since then.

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The freewheeling flow of information on public social media sites may cause many people in conservative, highly regulated industries such as financial services to shudder. But one Canadian firm has taken the plunge, believing its employees can use social tools in a safe and ultimately profitable way.

The benefits of using social media outweigh the regulatory overhead, said Silu Modi, vice president of digital marketing at Macquarie Private Wealth, during a session this week at the E2 conference in Boston. Benefits include the ability for Macquarie’s specialized brokers “to demonstrate they really know their industry” and achieve “thought leadership” through blog posts and Twitter messages, Modi said.

In other words, brokers that develop strong social personas can help raise Macquarie’s profile and bring in more business. To that end, Modi noted, 25 percent of LinkedIn users hold senior management titles or above and 41 percent earn six-figure salaries, he said. “If you’re a private wealth firm, that’s exactly what you’re looking for.”

But Macquarie faced some challenges in developing its social strategy. “The regulators put a nice little box around what you can do before you start a social media program,” he said. For one thing, all social media activity must be captured and maintained for years, and even user profile information has get the sign-off from the compliance department, he said.

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SAP has significantly improved the security of its products over the past few years but many of its customers are negligent with their deployments, which exposes them to potential attacks that could cripple their businesses, according to security researchers.

The biggest issue is that companies expose insecure SAP services to the Internet—not only HTTP services, but also critical administrative interfaces, Alexander Polyakov, chief technology officer at ERPScan, a developer of security monitoring products for SAP systems, said Tuesday.

Between 5 percent and 10 percent of companies that use SAP products expose critical services to the Internet that shouldn’t be publicly accessible, Polyakov said. This happens because they want to enable remote management or because of improper configurations, he said.

Most of the services have vulnerabilities that can be easily attacked, Polyakov said.

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Technology has changed everything we know about the office. Now it is threatening to get rid of the office as we know it.

A series of surveys undertaken by Intelligent Office, a virtual office space provider, show just how profound this shift in attitudes toward traditional working environments has become. Chief Operating Officer Tom Camplese sums up the results simply, saying "We believe there is a paradigm shift happening in our culture as it relates to work style. The work culture of today is very different than it was even 10 years ago, and individuals are now aspiring to work differently and create not only their own work style, but their own work rules.”

Intelligent Office

Three thousand people, Americans and Canadians aged 18 and up, were surveyed over an 18-month period that ended this April. The results paint an interesting picture of a rapidly evolving modern work force.

The desire for unprecedented work flexibility is the key touchstone of the surveys. That flexibility is manifest in just about every facet of the work environment. Workers want to decide where they work (home, office, coffee shop), when they work ("9 to 5" is all but dead), and how they work (preferring to use their own equipment over corporate-issued machines). Already, 70 percent of workers say they work from an alternative location than the office on a regular basis, and 66 percent said they use or want to use a laptop or tablet to allow this kind of flexibility.

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Demand for mainframe and high-performance Unix servers is falling, but a new wave of SPARC and IBM Power chips for the servers will be unwrapped at the Hot Chips conference in late August.

IBM, Oracle and Fujitsu—the main suppliers of Unix server chips—will talk about their next-generation RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computer) chips at the conference, which will be held Stanford University from Aug. 25 to 28. The chips typically go into high-availability servers, which are falling out of favor to the inexpensive and flexible x86 servers.

IBM will talk about the "next-generation Power microprocessor," according to the conference agenda. The next set of SPARC processors will also be detailed: Oracle will talk about SPARC M6, described in the agenda as the company's "next generation processor for massively scalable symmetric multiprocessor data center servers," and Fujitsu will talk about SPARC64 X+, successor to the current 16-core SPARC64 X.

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Microsoft will pay security researchers for finding and reporting vulnerabilities in the preview version of its Internet Explorer 11 (IE 11) browser, for finding novel techniques to bypass exploit mitigations present in Windows 8.1 or later versions, and for coming up with new ideas to defend against exploits.

The monetary rewards will be paid through three bounty programs the company launched Wednesday.

The payouts will range between $500 and $11,000 for vulnerabilities found in IE 11 Preview, depending on the type of vulnerability and quality of the report, and up to $100,000 for mitigation bypasses in Windows 8.1 and later versions.

There is also a defense bonus of up to $50,000, the BlueHat Bonus for Defense. Participants must submit a technical paper that describes an idea that could be used to block an exploitation technique that bypasses the latest Windows platform mitigations. The reward will depend on the quality and uniqueness of the idea, Microsoft said in the program’s guidelines.

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Java continues to be Public Enemy No. 1 when it comes to computer and network security. Oracle released a huge update for the virtually ubiquitous software, but attackers aren’t done exploiting Java as the weakest link in the security chain, and Oracle isn’t securing it fast enough.

The update released by Oracle yesterday addresses 40 vulnerabilities in Java. It also enables online certificate revocation in Java by default, to allow Java to verify in real time whether certificates used to sign Java code have been revoked to prevent execution of malware.

The update is impressive in scope and scale, and it’s important for IT admins and users to apply it as soon as possible. Amol Sarwate, director of Qualys Vulnerability Labs, notes in a blog post, “All vulnerabilities except three can be exploited remotely by an attacker, and in most cases, the attacker can take complete control of the system.”

Lamar Bailey, director of security research and development for Tripwire, has dubbed 2013 “the year of the Java vulnerability.” Bailey points out that Java is widely used across multiple platforms, and that alone makes it a juicy target for attackers. “Java is squarely in the crosshairs of many hackers and security researchers and that’s not going to change in the short term.”

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It looks like we aren’t the only ones impressed by the potential in Qualcomm’s powerful new Snapdragon 800 chip.

On the very same night that the company let us run a bevy of benchmark tests on that very processor, Bloomberg says that the speedy system-on-a-chip will power “some new versions” of Microsoft’s Surface RT tablet.

While the report seems innocuous enough at first glance, the one-line rumor actually intrigues on multiple levels—not the least of which is the allure of the first potential cellular-enabled Surface slate. Even so, beefed-up processors alone won’t cure what ails Windows RT.

“Some new versions”?

Before we get into that, though, the “some new versions” line—if accurate—suggests that Microsoft may release several different models of the Surface RT in the coming months.

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Google acquiring Waze almost seems redundant. Google is already a recognized leader in mapping services, so why does it need to buy a mapping company? The answer is that maps aren’t just maps anymore, and Waze will help Google move from mapping to social mapping.

It might look at first glance like the Waze purchase is a predatory move. Google has deep pockets and it can afford to spend money to buy Waze simply to prevent rivals from doing so. It may not actually use or incorporate Waze, because the goal of buying Waze is purely a strategic move to keep competitors in the rearview mirror.

That’s not the case, though. Maps aren’t just maps any more. Maps are a search engine in and of themselves—a trove of information that helps people get from Point A to Point B as efficiently as possible, and that helps them make smart choices about where to go and what to do once they arrive.

I’m dating myself, but once upon a time we relied on printed maps from AAA called TripTiks to navigate road trips. Then Mapquest came along, and we could just research our own routes and print our own maps. The advent of smartphones, and the rapid advances in mapping, and location-tracking services, however, combined with relevant, real-world information from social networks, has brought the concept of mapping to a whole new level.

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It seems you cannot go a day without hearing about someone or some group hacking a website or stealing credit card and other sensitive data from e-commerce sites.

So how do you protect your e-commerce site from being hacked and sensitive customer data from being stolen? CIO.com asked dozens of e-commerce and security experts to find out. Following are their top 15 tips for protecting your e-commerce site from hacking and fraud.

Choose a secure e-commerce platform

“Put your e-commerce site on a platform that uses a sophisticated object-orientated programming language,” says Shawn Hess, software development manager, VoIP Supply.

“We’ve used plenty of different open-source e-commerce platforms in the past, and the one we’re using now is by far the most secure,” Hess says. “Our administration panel is inaccessible to attackers because it’s only available on our internal network and completely removed from our public facing servers. Additionally, it has a secondary authentication that authenticates users with our internal Windows network.”

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