Sprint Nextel said it had received permission from SoftBank to negotiate a rival acquisition offer from Dish Network.

The board of Sprint Nextel has the right to terminate its existing merger agreement with SoftBank, subject to certain requirements, to accept a "Superior Offer," the company said in a statement late Monday. The board has not determined that the Dish offer is in fact superior, and has not changed its recommendation with regard to the SoftBank offer, it added.

SoftBank of Japan announced in October last year that it had reached a deal to acquire a 70 percent stake in Sprint for US$20 billion. Dish, a satellite TV service provider, made a $25.5 billion counter-bid to acquire Sprint last month.

The Japanese company said on Monday that it had given Sprint a waiver of certain provisions under the merger agreement including allowing Sprint to give Dish access to certain non-public information for due diligence purposes, and to negotiate with the rival bidder.

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Yahoo has made some radical changes to its Flickr photo sharing service, which now has a more photo-filled interface and comes with a free terabyte of storage so that users can upload images at their original resolution.

The changes were announced Monday evening at an event in Manhattan and follow Yahoo's news earlier in the day that it will buy the blogging site Tumblr for US$1.1 billion.

Since acquiring Flickr in 2005, Yahoo has been criticized for allowing the service to languish with few major improvements. Flickr has seen its popularity wane with the rise of competitors like Instagram, and of social media sites generally, though it still has about 89 million users.

The changes announced Monday are designed to "make Flickr awesome again," CEO Marissa Mayer said several times during Monday's event.

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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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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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