Samsung will host a US$800,000 contest for developers that build apps for the Galaxy S4 using the company's peer-to-peer software interface.

The South Korean company said Monday entrants in its "Smart App Challenge 2013" must make use of the Samsung Chord SDK (software development kit). Chord is a software interface for creating wireless connections directly between Samsung smartphones, without the use of an online server or mobile phone network.

Samsung is marketing its peer-to-peer technology to end users as "Group Play," a service for multiplayer games or sharing music and photos among users of its phones and tablets. The company is the world's largest smartphone manufacturer but relies on Google's Android ecosystem for the bulk of its online offerings and apps, most of which also run on rival phones.

The company said apps in the contest will be judged on categories such as uniqueness, commercial potential, and design. Apps must be entered for consideration from June 20 to Aug. 31, and the judging will run through November.

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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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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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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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With Bitcoin all the rage and startups popping up left and right, it's hard to know who's an expert in the virtual currency and who just has an opinion. Most people would put Jeff Garzik in the former camp.

A Bitcoin core developer for three years, he left his job at Red Hat on Friday to start work at Bitpay, the biggest Bitcoin payment processing service. IDG News Service caught up with him at the Bitcoin 2013 conference in Silicon Valley this weekend, where he talked about the state of Bitcoin today, the parallels with open source, and Bitcoin's pseudonymous creator, the elusive Satoshi Nakamoto. Following is an edited transcript of the conversation.

IDGNS: What's on people's minds at Bitcoin 2013? It feels like the Wild West right now—the exchange rate's up and down, the government's starting to regulate, there are startups cropping up everywhere, where are we at?

Garzik: Bitcoin's growing up. It's been a hobbyist-grown organic piece of software, an organic community. I was one of the hobbyists. It grew up slowly, slowly, slowly over time, and now VCs are all over the place trying to write checks. As a developer, I've told several people, I don't want your check. I just started work for a startup called Bitpay, my first day is today.

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In the face of a slump in PC sales and industry debate over whether the smartphone or tablet is now the preferred tool for a large segment of domestic and even small business users, Asus continues to release a number of combined and flexible devices that try to play on both sides of the dividing lines.

The most recent, announced at the Consumer Electronics Show in January and starting to ship worldwide, are the FonePad, a large-format smartphone—or small tablet—with a 7-inch touchscreen, and an "all-in-one" desktop doubling as a tablet, the Transformer AiO.

The Transformer AiO (All-in-One) has an 18.4-inch detachable display, which runs as a stand-alone tablet, albeit a rather cumbersome one. Based on an Intel Core processor, it runs either Windows 8 or Android operating systems.

The Transformer AiO's base station is a fully functional desktop in itself independent of the tablet-style screen and can be used through a separate monitor.

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Google I/O got most of the attention this week, but a conference at the other end of Silicon Valley showed there's plenty of innovation happening in the word of data centers, too.

On the exhibition floor at the Uptime Institute Symposium, I/O Data Centers showed software that lets a facilities manager navigate through a data center in virtual-reality fashion.

Using sensor readings from the equipment, staff can "fly" through aisles and in and out of server equipment, checking power and performance metrics along the way.

At another booth, 3M showed its Novec fire protection fluid, which is used in sprinkler systems and puts out fires by absorbing heat.

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The FBI has reportedly briefed bank executives on a wave of cyberattacks that have lashed the industry since last summer as part of a new policy designed to foster cooperation between the state and private sectors.

According to comments made at a Reuters event by FBI executive assistant director Richard McFeely, the Bureau had carried out a large videoconference with dozens of bank heads across the U.S. in April to urge them to share data on the attacks they are experiencing.

In the past the organization had conducted its investigations without keeping victim firms—in this case banks—informed, he admitted.

"That's 180 degrees from where we are now," Reuters reported him as saying of the FBI's change of approach.

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The "Bring Your Own Devices" trend has a dual-personality problem on its hands.

How can corporate data and personal data exist on a single smartphone? Companies don't want their deep secrets to get out, while employees don't want to be told how to use their precious mobile gadgets that they bought with their own money.

It's a problem that has stumped the BYOD crowd.

"Companies don't trust that information is contained properly" on a BYOD smartphone, says Nanci Churchill, vice president of operations at Mobi Wireless Management, a software and services provider helping companies navigate mobile adoption.

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As data-transfer shifts increasingly to the cloud, the servers stacked in datacenters handling the data become increasingly crowded. Virtualization means multiple users can share a single server.

This has positive aspects: servers don't sit idle, scalability is less of a concern, and datacenter efficiency improves. But there's a problem with too many users on a single server.

And it's going to get worse.

It's called "the noisy neighbor problem," and here's what happens: disk I/O for one user starts to interfere with the operations of another user on the same server.

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The nation's critical infrastructure is vulnerable to cyber attacks and better information sharing is needed to strengthen defenses.

That's the message Charles Edwards, deputy inspector general for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, told a Congressional committee at a public hearing on Thursday.

Since 1990, Industrial Control Systems, which are used to manage components of the country's critical infrastructure, have been connecting to the Internet to improve their operations, Edwards explained in written testimony submitted to the House Subcommittee on Cybersecurity, Infrastructure Protection and Security Technologies.

However, companies hooked their control systems into the public Internet with little regard for security. "[Security] for ICS was inherently weak because it allowed remote control of processes and exposed ICS to cyber security risks that could be exploited over the Internet," Edwards said.

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Bitcoin is growing up.

The virtual currency that caught the public's attention last month when its value zoomed briefly past $200 kicked off its first Silicon Valley conference Friday evening and shows no sign of losing momentum.

The event is small by Silicon Valley standards, with about 1000 attendees expected and 19 exhibitors, but it's bustling with startups launching new exchanges, software developers looking to strengthen the Bitcoin network, and venture capitalists seeking places to invest.

There's now $45 million a day being traded on the Bitcoin network, or $16 billion a year, according to Peter Vessenes, chairman of the Bitcoin Foundation, who talked at the start of the event in San Jose.

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Recently, the conversation turned to POW movies, which inevitably got me talking about "Stalag 17," the classic that inspired the (inferior) TV series "Hogan's Heroes."

I hadn't seen the film in years, but now, with it at the forefront of my mind, I was dying for a screening. Indeed, I thought even my kids were old enough to enjoy it, what with its great blend of humor, mystery, and suspense.

Ah, but where could I find it? I needed to know if and when it might be showing on cable, or, failing that, where I could stream it.

First stop: The TV Guide Watchlist. After you sign up for a free account and specify your local TV provider, you can add any movie to immediately find out when and where it's available: TV, streaming, DVD, etc.

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Forget Glass, self-driving cars or a smartwatch. Developers, not physical consumer products, were Google's darlings at the company's annual I/O conference this week.

Google brands I/O as a conference for developers, and this year, with a range of new tools unveiled to attract more outside developers -- and boost the revenue from their services -- the company sought to deliver the goods to I/O's intended audience.

"Giving back to the developer community was a big theme," said Andrew Levy, CEO at Crittercism, an app performance management company, who attended the conference.

It was a stark contrast to last year's show, which saw a group of skydivers wearing Glass, the company's closely watched augmented reality system, land on top of San Francisco's Moscone convention center during a lively keynote address delivered by Google co-founder Sergey Brin.

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A strong stock market could open the floodgates for more tech IPOs in the wake of Friday’s solid debut of Marketo and Tableau, but not all segments of IT may be able to ride the wave.

Marketo, which sells cloud-based marketing software, jumped 78 percent to close at US$23.10, up $10.10 from its opening on the Nasdaq. Tableau, a business intelligence and data visualization company trading under the eye-catching ticker “DATA”, rose 64 percent to close at $50.75, up $19.75 from its opening on the New York Stock Exchange.

Tableau originally was set to offer 7.2 million shares but added another million shares thanks to an institutional investor that underwrote more of the float at the last moment. As a result, the company raised $254 million, rather than the $150 million it originally sought.

The promising debuts came as major markets and indexes rose for the fourth straight week, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average, the Standard and Poor’s 500 and the tech-heavy Nasdaq exchange all closing up for the week. The Dow and the S&P have both hit nominal (not adjusted for inflation) record highs recently, having surpassed the milestone round figures of 15,000 and 1,600, respectively, three weeks ago.

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Hop on an Emirates flight in Dubai and get up to cruising altitude. You realize you forgot to tell your assistant to make some crucial plans when you arrive at your destination. No problem: Just take out your cell phone and make a quick phone call.

Say what? Emirates is one of just a handful of airlines that let passengers make calls in flight, not through a funky seat-back phone (though the airline offers those, too), but through a system that relays regular wireless phone calls through a satellite and back down to the ground. Provided by either OnAir or AeroMobile, the service is available on 300 Emirates flights every day.

And a single plane has yet to crash because of it.

The technology behind in-flight phone calls isn't all that complicated. Calls are handled by a picocell on the plane, which is basically the same technology behind Gogo Inflight Internet, which relays Wi-Fi signals to ground-based cell towers, and which is now included on 1,600 commercial aircraft.

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Dell's thumb-sized PC called Project Ophelia, which is the size of a USB stick, will start shipping in July for around $100.

The Android-based device will plug into a display's HDMI port so that it can run applications or access files stored remotely. It will have Wi-Fi and Bluetooth capabilities and is aimed at users who do most of their computing on the Web.

Ophelia can turn any screen or display into a PC, gaming machine or a TV set-top box, said Jeff McNaught, executive director of cloud client computing at Dell. Users will be able to download apps, movies and TV shows from the Google Play store, McNaught said. Users will also be able to run Android games or stream movies from Hulu or Netflix.

It is meant to be an inexpensive alternative to tablets and PCs, McNaught said. However, users need to be close to a TV screen, display or projector with an HDMI port to use it.

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Operators of two alleged tech support scams that charged consumers hundreds of dollars to supposedly fix their computers have settled charges from the U.S. Federal Trade Commission.

Mikael Marczak, doing business as Virtual PC Solutions, and Sanjay Agarwalla were among the subjects of six complaints the FTC filed against alleged tech support scams last September.

Under settlements announced by the FTC Friday, the two are prohibited from marketing or selling any computer technical support service. Marczak and his company, Conquest Audit, also are prohibited from marketing or selling debt relief services, the FTC said in a press release. Neither of the men admitted wrongdoing under terms of the settlement.

The settlement with Agarwalla requires him to pay $3000, the amount of money he received in the alleged scam operation, the FTC said. The final order against Marczak and Conquest Audit includes a $984,721 judgment, the total amount of money lost by consumers in the scams, but the order is stayed due to their inability to pay, the agency said.

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I never thought a truck-driving simulator could be fun, but Euro Truck Simulator 2 proved me wrong. There is something soothing in watching the world go by from the high and mighty cockpit of a Volvo FH16 Globetrotter XL. If you are used to more traditional racing games, getting used to the way trucks handle in the game may take some time. They really do feel like trucks: Slow to accelerate, jarringly fast to brake thanks to air brakes, ungainly to maneuver, and immensely powerful.

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Italian police arrested four suspected hackers Friday, accusing them of having taken control of the Italian branch of the Anonymous network.

The alleged hackers, aged between 20 and 34, were placed under house arrest near the northern cities of Bologna, Turin and Venice, and in the southern town of Lecce.

Six more people were placed formally under investigation and a total of 10 premises were raided at the conclusion of a two-year police investigation code-named “Tango Down.”

Investigators said the group, which had created a dominant cell within Anonymous Italy, was responsible for cyberattacks on commercial and government websites, including sites belonging to the Vatican, the Italian prime minister’s office, the defense ministry, the police, Bank of Italy and the national railway company Trenitalia.

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There's a lot to be said for software that just works. That isn't to say that Adobe Reader doesn't work, but it has a lot of baggage attached to it that Foxit Reader doesn't. As a result, Foxit is significantly smaller and faster.

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Security researchers from Trend Micro have uncovered an active cyberespionage operation that so far has compromised computers belonging to government ministries, technology companies, media outlets, academic research institutions and nongovernmental organizations from more than 100 countries.

The operation, which Trend Micro has dubbed SafeNet, targets potential victims using spear phishing emails with malicious attachments. The company's researchers have investigated the operation and published a research paper with their findings Friday.

Two tactics spotted

The investigation uncovered two sets of command-and-control (C&C) servers used for what appear to be two separate SafeNet attack campaigns that have different targets, but use the same malware.

One campaign uses spear phishing emails with content related to Tibet and Mongolia. These emails have .doc attachments that exploit a Microsoft Word vulnerability patched by Microsoft in April 2012.

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Google did its best to court developers at this year's I/O conference with a much-needed integrated developer environment, API for better games, and the capability to more easily translate apps. Their allegiance will become increasingly important as smartphone and tablet hardware sees fewer dramatic improvements.

"You guys, Android developers, are really the heart of this ecosystem and I think you know that. We have been on this journey together for over five years now," said Hugo Barra, vice president of Android product management, during the opening keynote.

The past 12 months have been lucrative for Android developers, according to Barra.

"Here is a pretty insane number for you: Google Play has just crossed 48 billion app installs ... but even better than that; over the last four months this year we have already paid out more money to Android developers on Google Play than in all of last year," Barra said.

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Four members of the infamous and largely British LulzSec hacking group that carried a string of high-profile distributed denial of DDoS attacks in 2011 have been handed relatively lenient prison terms of up to 32 months by the judge at Southwark Crown Court in the UK.

The bare facts are that Ryan Cleary, 21, and Ryan Ackroyd, 26, were given prison terms of 32 and 30 months respectively, while Jake Davis ('Topiary'), 20, will spend 24 months in a young offender's institution; Mustafa Al-Bassam, 18, was handed a 20 month suspended sentence.

All will be watched by the authorities for up to five years after their eventual release.

US laws are tougher

Although these sentences count as relatively severe by UK standards for hacking offenses, they are probably mild compared to the terms that might have been handed out in the U.S. where collaborator and former LulzSec leader Hector Xavier Monsegur ('Sabu') has so far won sentencing delays only after turning police informer.

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If your company hasn’t yet embraced BYOD (bring your own device), there’s a good chance it will soon. Gartner has predicted that 90 percent of all companies will support BYOD by 2014, and recently projected that half of all companies may actually require users to participate in BYOD plans by 2017.

BYOD offers a variety of benefits for both the employee and the employer. The employee gets to use the platforms and devices she is most comfortable with and has consistency between work and home. The employer reduces its burden to purchase or maintain the equipment. Surveys show that employees work an average of 240 more hours per year under BYOD.

BYOD also introduces some concerns. Companies have to determine how to give employees access to the applications and data they need on their mobile devices, while also protecting and securing sensitive data.

Challenges of BYOD

Software used by the company—whether it’s custom applications, software specific to a given industry, or just Microsoft Office—can be installed and used on employee-owned laptop PCs, but it will require purchasing additional licenses in many cases. When it comes to tablets and smartphones, though, users are forced to find suitable alternatives that offer varying degrees of compatibility and synchronization.In order for employees to be productive using their own laptops, tablets, and smartphones, they need the right tools and the ability to access data. However, most of the software users rely on to get work done doesn’t have a mobile app equivalent, and accessing data while on the go can be complicated.

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Privacy laws protecting bank account holders are more important than providing information to aid in copyright enforcement, according to a Dutch court ruling this week.

The Dutch ING Bank doesn't have to reveal who has access to a bank account, the number for which is posted on the website FTD World, the Amsterdam district court ruled.

FTD World, at ftdworld.net, is a Usenet-indexing website that lists links to binary files posted on Usenet. It also provides files in the NZB format listing that allows users to download the posted files more easily. By doing this, the site provides access to copyrighted entertainment files including books, movies, music, games, and software without the permission of the copyright holders, according to Dutch anti-piracy foundation Brein.

Brein wanted the court to force ING Bank to reveal who is behind a bank account number posted to the site that is used to receive donations, according to the verdict published by the court on Thursday. It had previously been unable to track down the domain name registrant and had received no reply to a letter sent to the Russian hosting provider.

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The computer virus seems to be making a subtle comeback.

The term virus is frequently used as a catch-all for malicious software, but actually describes a very specific type of program that infects files and replicates, noticeable impairing a computer. Most malware these days tries to not be so obvious.

But Microsoft has noticed that viruses—which have been present on around 5 percent of the computers the company regularly polls—have increased in prevalence in some regions, wrote Tim Rains, director of the company's Trustworthy Computing section.

In the fourth quarter of last year, viruses were present on about 7.8 percent of computers scanned by the company, he wrote. In some locations, such as Pakistan, Indonesia, Ethiopia, Bangladesh, Somalia, Egypt and Afghanistan, the percentage of computers with viruses ranged from 35 to 44 percent, he wrote.

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Mozilla has postponed blocking third-party cookies by default in Firefox 22, "to collect and analyze data on the effect of blocking some third-party cookies."

The nonprofit organization is, however, not softening its stand on protecting privacy and putting users first, Brendan Eich, Mozilla's CTO and senior vice president of engineering, wrote in a blog post Thursday.

Mozilla has been testing a patch from Jonathan Mayer, a graduate student at Stanford University in computer science and law and online privacy activist, which like Apple's Safari browser allows cookies from websites already visited, but blocks cookies from sites not visited yet.

A pre-build version of the browser, called Firefox Aurora, was released on April 5, and included the patch to only allow cookies from sites visited. Aurora is a preliminary stage in the development cycle before Beta and Release of a version of Firefox.

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Employees at the Chinese factories of Apple supplier Foxconn continue to work beyond the country's legal limit of 49 hours a month, according to a report from the Fair Labor Association (FLA). But the Taiwanese manufacturer is making overall steady progress in improving the working conditions at a select group of factories in China, it said.

The report released Thursday is the latest audit from the FLA, which has been tasked by Apple to monitor the working conditions at three Foxconn factories in the Chinese cities of Shenzhen and Chengdu that produce iPad and iPhone products. Since the initial audits were carried out in February last year, the factories have instituted new changes, including enforcing breaks for workers and stopping student interns from logging overtime hours.

IDGNS

Foxconn has made "significant progress" in reducing employee working time to 60 hours per week, or what Apple demands in its own labor code, according to the audit. Workers at two of the three factories in China logged between 40 and 60 hours per week. At the other factory, the working time for employees was largely the same, except for three weeks in September and October, where the hours ranged between 40 and 70 per week.

The manufacturer has yet to cut down employee work time to 49 hours per week, a goal the company wants to reach by July of this year. Chinese labor laws limit working hours to only 40 per week, plus an additional 9 hours for overtime.

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