It appears Canada’s anti-money laundering regulator will leave Bitcoin exchanges in the country alone for now.

LibertyBit, which exchanges the virtual currency Bitcoin for U.S. and Canadian dollars, has been told it does not have to register with Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canada (FINTRAC), said CEO Paul Szczesny, via email on Tuesday.

FINTRAC, which was created in 2000, is responsible for investigating and preventing money-laundering and activities used to fund terrorism.

But concerns have been raised in some quarters that the high degree of anonymity of Bitcoin transactions makes them attractive for criminal purposes such as tax evasion.

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Mobile operators collect huge amounts of data about how their subscribers use mobile data, and that information is starting to go on sale as targeted intelligence that enterprises can use to better reach consumers.

SAP will introduce a cloud-based service at this week’s CTIA Wireless trade show that will collect information from carriers about what mobile sites and apps their customers use, and even where they are when they use them. Using its own HANA in-memory computing technology, SAP will crunch the big data in near real time and sell it for marketing use. Carriers are already talking to SAP about the service, called SAP Consumer Insight 365, and enterprises may begin using the data within about three months, said John Sims, president of SAP mobile services.

The data won’t tell SAP what specific user did what and where, but the company will be able to break down the information by demographic measures such as country, neighborhood, gender and age group, plus time measures down to the time of day, Sims said. As for location data, it will be up the carriers how specific it gets.

With HANA, SAP’s data centers can work through billions of rows of data per second, Sims said. That’s important because an average medium-sized operator may generate one terabyte per day of information about subscribers’ mobile activity, he said. The most current data will reside in HANA, while the rest will move to a more persistent environment such as a Hadoop cluster or SAP’s SybaseIQ database.

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Toshiba said it will soon begin mass producing a new type of 64Gbit NAND flash that is the smallest and fastest in its class, though it still lags rival Samsung Electronics in the development of an even denser flash technology.

Toshiba said Tuesday that it will begin mass production this month of a 64Gbit chip with an area of 94 square millimeters that can write data at 25MB per second. The new chips, made using a 19-nanometer process, are the fastest and smallest to use 2-bit-per-cell technology, Toshiba said.

Main rival Samsung is already a step ahead. The South Korean company said last month that it began mass-producing a 128Gbit NAND chip with 3-bit-per-cell technology, also using a process smaller than 20 nanometers.

Toshiba said it is also working on 3-bit-per-cell technology, and aims to begin mass production by September. The company said it would first focus on smartphones and tablet memory with the chips, then expand to notebook PCs.

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Amazon Web Services has finally received certification under the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program, which the company said will lower the cost of implementing its cloud services among government organizations and agencies in the U.S.

FedRAMP is a mandatory government-wide program that standardizes security assessment, authorization, and monitoring for cloud products and services. As part of the program, Amazon has been granted two so-called Agency Authorities to Operate (ATOs) by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, it said.

One ATO covers the GovCloud “region” of AWS infrastructure, and the other the U.S. East/West regions of its cloud infrastructure. Within those boundaries, agencies can use Amazon’s EC2 compute cloud, Simple Storage Service (S3) and Elastic Block Store (EBS). They can also use its Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), which allows IT staff to create an isolated section of Amazon’s cloud where they can launch resources in a virtual network defined by themselves, including public subnets, private subnets, and hardware VPN access.

In a recent interview, Stephen Schmidt, chief information security officer at Amazon Web Services, talked about how he looked forward to getting a FedRAMP certification.

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A boutique system builder has bucked the industry trend of slumping PC sales by continuing to focus on selling Windows 7 machines.

Auburn, Wash.-based Puget Systems grew sales 20% in 2012, said Jon Bach, president of the independent PC seller, by specializing in high-performance, buit-to-order PCs—primarily desktops.

Puget’s performance is in stark contrast to the global PC market, which contracted 6% in the fourth quarter of last year, and plummeted 14% in the first quarter of 2013, according to research firm IDC.

Puget also went against the grain by selling significantly more Windows 7 PCs than ones equipped with the new Windows 8. That was not a strategy of its own choosing, however, as customers select the operating system for their custom-built machines.

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Vodafone’s revenue dropped 4.2 percent for its fiscal year to March 31, because of tough economic conditions, particularly in Southern Europe.

The operator’s group revenue dropped to £44.4 billion (US$67.8 billion) for the year ended March 31, and net profit fell sharply from £7 billion to £673 million.

Behind those numbers are Vodafone’s problems in Southern Europe where revenue was down by 16 percent. The effects of “severe macroeconomic weakness were intensified by strong competition,” according to Vodafone said. Revenue rose 2.7 percent in Northern and Central Europe but fell 2.9 percent in Africa, the Middle East and Asia-Pacific.

Operators today struggling to balance falling revenue from voice and messaging services with growth in revenue from data. In Vodafone’s case, revenue from the first two decreased by £3.8 billion, while data revenue grew by just £469 million.

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Mageia has long been what you might call a “best-kept secret” of the Linux world, consistently residing among the top five distributions in DistroWatch's page-hit rankings despite minimal marketing and hoopla.

The distro has only been around since it was forked from Mandriva Linux back in 2010, of course, but after several weeks' delay  the Mageia project on Sunday finally launched the third major version of the free and open source operating system.

Mageia Linux 2 made its debut just about a year ago. Now, Mageia 3 is here, “all grown up and ready to go dancing,” as it was put in the project's weekend announcement.

Mageia 3 is dedicated to the late “Eugeni Dodonov, our friend, our colleague and a great inspiration,” the team added.

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The Pentagon's decision to grant Apple the security clearance required for iOS 6 devices to go head-to-head with BlackBerry 10 and certain Samsung Galaxy S4 devices on secure military networks could have with a cascading effect that spills over into the private sector.

BlackBerry 10 and the Samsung Galaxy S4 received security clearance from the Pentagon earlier this month. The Pentagon has not approved Android in general, or even the Samsung Galaxy S4 in its default state. The Samsung Galaxy S4 is authorized only as long as it uses Samsung’s Knox security software.

The Pentagon uses approximately 600,000 mobile devices. The vast majority of those are BlackBerry, because BlackBerry established itself early on as a secure, manageable mobile platform. Now, BlackBerry will have to fight with Apple and Samsung to maintain that dominance.

The United States Air Force is eager to jump on the iOS bandwagon. Following in the footsteps of many commercial airlines, the USAF plans to replace bulky flight manuals and flight plans with iPads.

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Welcome to the wacky world of tech patents—a place where you’ll find not just the crazy-sounding ideas that inhabit any category of patents granted by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), but some ideas that seem so minute or so obvious that you wonder how they ever qualified as patentworthy.

Once issued, however, a patent isn’t just a shield. It’s a weapon that companies and individuals can use against their competitors. “Patent trolls” are infamous for acquiring patents and then making the business of filing lawsuits against alleged infringers their core competency.

The technology sector is hardly alone in taking patent-holding to extreme levels of judivial enforcement. But some of the most bizarre tech patents we found suggest that we may need a new idea for protecting ideas—one that can more easily weed out the lawyers and the loonies.

The 'Interactive Web' patent

1998

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The European Union may be trying to protect its telecom equipment industry with its recent threat to investigate China over networking equipment imports. But the move could end up hurting the chances of Western vendors intent on supplying technology to China’s upcoming 4G services launch, according to analysts.

Last week, the EU set off fears of a trade war with China after it said it could resort to probing the nation’s sales of mobile networking gear for anti-competitive practices. In response, China has warned the EU against taking “protectionist” measures that would damage economic relations between the two governments.

“If the EU insists on starting the investigation, China will follow WTO [World Trade Organization] rules and Chinese law to take resolute measures to protect its rights and interests,” said China’s Ministry of Commerce spokesman Shen Danyang last Thursday. “The EU, which started the friction, will have to take full responsibility for the resulting consequences.”

The EU has yet to launch its investigation, and wants to first negotiate with China over a possible resolution. But the trade tensions risk affecting the tendering process to build China’s 4G networks, said Matt Walker, an analyst with research firm Ovum.

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Ready for an unconventional upgrade? How about this: You can turn an old, pokey external hard drive into a blazingly fast one with about 10 minutes of your time and $15 of your money.

See, most modern computers have at least one USB 3.0 port. You can plug an older, USB 2.0 drive into one, but you won't get the faster throughput afforded by the newer technology.

Thankfully, you don't need to get a new drive just to enjoy speedier file transfers; you just need a new drive enclosure.

You can buy one for around $15, give or take $5, and from there it's a fairly simply matter to transplant your old drive. Just unscrew the old enclosure, remove whatever screws are holding the drive in place, then separate the drive. Now install it in the new enclosure using the provided instructions (if you even need them; it's a pretty self-explanatory procedure).

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Google will retire its Checkout payment processing tool on November. 20, and warned retailers they will need to move to a different payment processing platform.

Checkout, which launched in 2006, was merged with Wallet, which is a mobile payments tool, last November. The product was aimed at taking on eBay’s PayPal service, which dominates Web-based payments.

Google said it has partnered with Braintree, Shopify and Freshbooks to offer discounted options for retailers that have not yet selected an alternative payment processor.

Wallet will now be the company’s focus. Developers for its Play store will be moved to the Google Wallet Merchant Center, Justin Lawyer, senior product manager for Google Wallet, wrote. There will be no changes for consumers using Wallet on sites such as Priceline and Uber, according to Lawyer.

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Windows 8, released to the wild last October, seems stuck in a no-win situation.

On the one hand, it is not catching on with Android- and iOS-loving consumers turned off by the Windows 8 tile-based interface and the Windows App Store, which by Android and Apple standards, is anemic and disorganized. And these days, consumer technology is frequently a precursor to enterprise technology as shown by the BYOD (bring your own device) phenomenon.

On the other hand, the situation for Windows 8 isn't any better in the enterprise. IT decision-makers interviewed for a new Forrester report don't see the Windows 8 experience as an improvement over the stable and well-liked Windows 7, mostly due to confusing behavior between applications running in the "Metro" touch interface and those running in the traditional desktop mode.

In the report, entitled "IT Will Skip Windows 8 as the Enterprise Standard," IT professionals reveal that a top concern about Windows 8 is the "potential for significant user training and support and the need for application redesign to take advantage of the new Windows 8 interface."

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Few phenomena have been so widely discussed yet remain so puzzling as the world of Bitcoins. Businesses galore are now asking themselves whether Bitcoin is something they need to take seriously, even though most have absolutely no idea what it is.

First, a primer.

Bitcoins are, in the words of the Bitcoin Project, open-source, peer-to-peer digital currency. For those accustomed to dollars and cents, almost none of that makes any sense at all. Boiling it down: Bitcoins are a synthetic currency that are kept in a "digital wallet" on your PC or mobile phone. Payments are sent from one wallet to another—similar to Paypal—and an in-depth cryptographic system verifies that transactions (such as purchases) are legitimate. These transactions are verified by other Bitcoin users (part of the P2P aspect of the currency), and as a reward, those transaction processors are eligible to receive newly minted Bitcoins. (These amount to free money, but they are exceedingly difficult to obtain. This has led to sophisticated Bitcoin mining operations sprouting up, as well as an entire industry based on supporting of those operations.)

The fever surrounding Bitcoins has created one of the most volatile investments you can find. A single Bitcoin was worth about $20 in February before climbing to a value of more than $230 by April 10. By April 17, they had dropped to $70. And as I write this on May 20, Bitcoins are trading for $122. Speculating on Bitcoins requires either incredible fortitude or a massive amount of blind faith.

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Microsoft Flight is the current incarnation of a long and illustrious franchise of games, dating back to 1977. Unlike SimCity, you can start playing Microsoft Flight for free: Simply download the game and embark on a series of missions planned to both teach you the basics of flight, and hook you into buying later missions and additional aircraft. Microsoft Flight is the last of its kind: Microsoft permanently stopped work on the game in July 2012, just a few short months after releasing it.

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For the last three months or so, the U.S. government and some of its defense contractors have engaged in a war of shame on China to pressure it to cool its cyber-attacks on U.S. targets. The campaign appeared to be yielding results, but it seems that Chinese hackers were only catching their breath.

The notorious Unit 61398, also known as the “Comment Crew,”—an elite cyber unit linked by U.S. security firms to the China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA)—has renewed its raids on U.S. entities using different techniques, the New York Times reported Sunday.

Cyber security firm Mandiant told the Times that the attacks had been renewed, but would not identify the targets—although it did acknowledge that many of them were the same ones assaulted earlier by the Chinese cyber unit.

Mandiant did not respond to a request for comment for this story.

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Beyond the Hotspot software that comprises the bulk of their business, Connectify Inc. makes another utility for laptop enthusiasts: Dispatch.

Connectify Dispatch works by simultaneously leveraging the multiple network adapters and high-speed USB ports available on modern systems to boost bandwidth and reliability. Each Internet connection you add to Dispatch's list of active adapters increases potential download speeds and provides automatic failover in the case one of the connections fails. For the most part, this works swimmingly. However, there's a bit of the devil in the details.

Setup is straightforward and largely automatic. Users are presented with a window that lists available adapters and indicates whether or not they are bound to Dispatch. A graph charts the combined bandwidth on tap, and settings allow for customized application routing, bandwidth caps for metered Internet feeds, and various routing strategies that maximize efficiency in marginal networking situations.

The first prerequisite is an obvious one: You need access to multiple, separate Internet connections for Dispatch to work as advertised. The hidden detail here is that combined bandwidth isn't directly additive. Two 20 Mbs connections won't yield a 40 Mbs single-socket download, for example, but they will allow for loads to be balanced and intelligently routed to an available adapter with the most suitable bandwidth. BitTorrents and other software that utilize multiple sockets will allow downloads to reach full combined speeds, however.

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A recent intrusion on the computer network of Norwegian telecommunications company Telenor was the result of a large cyberespionage operation of Indian origin that for the past few years has targeted business, government and political organizations from different countries, according to researchers from security firm Norman Shark.

Researchers from Norman analyzed the malware samples used in the attack on Telenor, which started out with spear-phishing emails sent to the company's senior management, after receiving information about them from the Norwegian Computer Emergency Response Team (NorCERT).

During their investigation, the Norman researchers established correlations between that attack's command-and-control infrastructure and other malware and domain names, uncovering what appears to be an ongoing large-scale cyberespionage operation of Indian origin that has been active for almost three years.

The operation was dubbed HangOver and dates back to at least September 2010, Norman said in a report released Monday. The attackers targeted business, government and political organizations, including targets of national security interest from Pakistan, separatist groups from India and companies from different industries from the U.S. and other countries.

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Retina who? Not to be outdone on the display front, Samsung is showing off a 13.3-inch LCD notebook panel with a whopping 3200-by-1800 resolution screen.

Samsung Display will showcase the high-resolution screen during Display Week 2013 in Vancouver, British Columbia.

Samsung's panel has a pixel density of 276 pixels per inch. If Samsung or other PC makers bring this display to market, it would easily outshine Apple's MacBook Pro with Retina Display (227 ppi), Toshiba's Kirabook (221 ppi), and Google's Chromebook Pixel (239 ppi).

But that's a big “if” in the near term, considering that Samsung hasn't actually announced any products that use the display. Last August, the company showed off a prototype 13.3-inch laptop with a 2560-by-1440 resolution panel (pictured above), but that hasn't come to market yet, either.

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Alloystory asked the Laptops forum about speeding up a PC by replacing the hard drive with something faster.

Hard drives are classic bottlenecks, and they definitely slow down computers. But whether you can significantly open up that bottleneck depends on the speed of your current drive, how many available drive bays you have, how much storage space you need, and how much money you're willing to spend.

You effectively have three options (four if you include leaving things as they are). You can buy an SSD, buy a faster hard drive, or set up a RAID. I've already discussed RAIDs in Multiple hard drives working together: All about RAID setups, so I won't cover that here.

[Email your tech questions to answer@pcworld.com or post them on the PCW Answer Line forum.]

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After being accused of a lack of transparency by an independent watchdog, the European Privacy Association (EPA) has confirmed that Google, Microsoft and Yahoo are backers.

The Corporate Europe Observatory (CEO), which works to expose privileged access in E.U. policy making, said in a complaint Thursday that the European Privacy Association is working to represent industry interests in the debate on data protection in Europe, even though it has not listed any corporate backers on the E.U.'s "Transparency Register."

The register, which is operated by the European Parliament and European Commission, requires all signatories to disclose their interests, objectives or aims and, where applicable, the clients they represent.

The EPA is listed in the category of think tanks, research and academic institutions and claims to have only 10 private (non-corporate) members. However, EPA managing director Pietro Paganini confirmed to the IDG News Service that Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft are members.

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Bob Metcalfe, Dave Boggs and the rest of the scientists at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center in 1973 were a lot like young developers at a Silicon Valley startup today.

"Beards, Birkenstocks, blue jeans, T-shirts," Metcalfe said earlier this month, recalling how he and his colleagues looked and dressed when they went to work at the cluster of modern, low-slung buildings amid suburban fields during its heyday 40 years ago. He was 27 then. "I had a big, red beard," the gray-haired Metcalfe said. When he and his colleagues padded over to PARC's main conference room in their German hippie sandals for a meeting, they flopped down into beanbag chairs, the only seating in the room. And as in a startup, the relaxed setting disguised an intense environment. "We worked around the clock, generally."

The proto-Silicon Valley geeks even had the Internet, once Metcalfe had set up the connection soon after arriving at PARC in June 1972. At that time it was in an early form called Arpanet, over which researchers at PARC and other institutions could log on to other computers over long distances.

But Facebook, Netflix cat videos and even the Web were still many years away. The staples of the modern Internet would require a much faster network. It would start with one fast enough to send memos to the laser printers PARC was inventing. The rest would come later: email, images, voice, music and video, all in little bundles of moving data called packets.

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Three workers at Foxconn factories in China have fallen to their deaths in recent weeks and police are investigating, according to the company.

On April 27 and May 14, two workers employed at the Foxconn factory in Zhengzhou, China, separately fell to their deaths, according to the Taiwanese manufacturing giant. On May 11, another worker from Foxconn's Chongqing facility was also found dead. A video posted online purportedly showed the worker falling down from a building.

Police are investigating the incidents. But Foxconn said the two deaths in Zhengzhou were unrelated to work matters, according to a company internal review.

"Suicide is a complex issue," the company said in statement, "there is no one reason that can ever be cited for any such incident."

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Yahoo Japan, the country's largest Web portal, said up to 22 million user IDs may have been leaked during a hack that was discovered last week.

The company emphasized that the IDs are already public information, and no passwords or other private data were affected. Yahoo Japan IDs are used along with password to log in to the site, and are often displayed when users leave comments or use its shopping or auction services.

Yahoo Japan said it discovered illicit access to its ID servers on Thursday evening, and upon further investigation found a file with 22 million user IDs on it. The company said it wasn't sure if the file had been transferred outside of the company, but couldn't deny the possibility.

The website posted warnings of the possible breach on its login pages, and offered a service for users to check if their IDs were among those that were possibly leaked. Yahoo Japan said last year it had over 24 million active user IDs.

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Bringing wireless indoors, which was once just a matter of antennas carrying a few cellular bands so people could get phone calls, has grown far more complex and demanding in the age of Wi-Fi, multiple radio bands and more powerful antennas.

DAS (distributed antenna systems) using coaxial cable have been the main solution to the problem, but they now face some limitations. To address them, Corning will introduce a DAS at this week's CTIA Wireless trade show in Las Vegas that uses fiber instead of coax all the way from the remote cell antennas to the base station in the heart of a building.

Cable-based DAS hasn't kept up with the new world, according to the optical networking vendor. Though Corning is associated more often with clear glass than with thin air, it entered the indoor wireless business in 2011 by buying DAS maker MobileAccess. That's because Corning thinks optical fiber is the key to bringing more mobile capacity and coverage inside.

The system, called Corning Optical Network Evolution (ONE) Wireless Platform, can take the place of a DAS based fully or partly on coaxial cable, according to Bill Cune, vice president of strategy for Corning MobileAccess. Corning ONE will let mobile carriers, enterprises or building owners set up a neutral-host DAS for multiple carriers using many different frequencies.

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BRR-RING! The phone rings at midnight, interrupting your sleep—or worse, your late night Steam session with your gaming clan. Is someone sick? Did a car hit your dog? Is it your pal, calling to tell you he got the munchies and discovered that, joy of joys, the McRib is back? Perplexed (and maybe a bit hungry), you pick up your handset, and hear the ominous words:

Doubling as unofficial tech support for your family and friends comes as part of the territory when you're a PC geek—and those cries for help frequently come all too often or at inopportune times. Weekends! Holidays! Nights! All gone, consumed by the fight against malware and missing Internet Explorer icons.

It doesn't have to be like this.

Rather than running around and slapping Band-Aids on all the problems, get proactive! An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, as they say, and taking the time to set your friends' and loved ones' computers up the right way can dramatically cut back on help-seeking headaches down the line. Not to sound too dramatic, but yes, these tips can help you reclaim your nights and weekends.

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Devices built around Apple's iOS operating system have been approved by the U.S. Department of Defense for use on its networks, as the department moves to support multivendor mobile devices and operating systems.

The Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA), which certifies commercial technology for defense use, said Friday it had approved the Apple iOS 6 Security Technical Implementation Guide (STIG).

"Approval of the STIG means that government-issued iOS 6 mobile devices are approved for use when connecting to DOD networks within current mobility pilots or the future mobile device management framework," the agency said in a statement.

The department earlier this month cleared BlackBerry 10 smartphones and PlayBook tablets with its enterprise mobility management platform BlackBerry Enterprise Service 10 to be used on its networks. It also approved Samsung Electronics' Knox, a new Android-based platform designed by the company to enhance security of the current open source Android.

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The Electronic Frontier Foundation has resumed accepting bitcoins donations, saying some of the legal ambiguity around the virtual currency has disappeared.

The influential digital watchdog stopped accepting bitcoins two years ago citing a raft of complex legal questions that could have inadvertently thrust the nonprofit as a defender rather than an observer of an emerging technology.

The EFF wrote on its blog that its own research along with recent guidance from the U.S. Treasury Department's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) "have confirmed that, as a user of Bitcoin or any virtual currency, EFF itself is likely not subject to regulation."

Bitcoin's challenge

It's still early days for how bitcoin will be viewed under the law. But FinCEN found in March that users of bitcoin do not need to register with the organization, but those exchanging bitcoins for U.S. dollars qualify as money services businesses and do need to register. The largest bitcoin exchange, Mt. Gox, has already run into trouble for not registering.

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While there's no shortage of email providers, Gmail's simple design, ease of use and cool features continue to attract users. Whether you're sorting through hundreds of work emails a day or using the service to keep in touch with friends and family, keeping up to date on its latest features can help you get the most out of it.

Here's a look at five of Gmail's newest features, including quickly adding appointments to your calendar, customizing your background image and using advanced search to find the email you're looking for.

1. How to add events to your calendar

If you use Gmail to coordinate or schedule meetings, Google has made adding them to your Calendar—without leaving Gmail—easy.

Beginning last week, all dates and times in emails appear underlined. Hover over them to preview your schedule for the day and change the title, date or time of the event. Click "Add to Calendar" will do just that. The entry in your calendar will also include a link back to the original email, making the details easy to reference.

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