Datamation Staff

The Register: Responding to the arrest of some of their members, the hacktivist groups Anonymous and LulzSec have released 10GB of information stolen from US police departments. The data comes from 76 law enforcement websites in 11 states and includes email addresses, social security numbers and credit card details for police officers, as well as […]

Cnet: An obscure company named Operating Systems Solutions has sued Apple. It claims that OS X’s fast startup procedures violate a patent the company owns. The patent, first obtained by LG in 2002, covers “a method for fast booting a computer system, comprising the steps of: A. performing a power on self test (POST) of […]

Computerworld: On Sunday, lightning struck a transformer in Dublin, knocking Amazon Web Services at the data center located there offline. Normally, backup generators would kick in after a power outage, but the blast also damaged those generators. As a result, many European users of Amazon’s cloud computing services like EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) and EBS […]

ComputerWeekly: On Tuesday, August 9, Microsoft will release 13 security bulletins as part of its regularly scheduled August “Patch Tuesday.” Two of those bulletins are rated “critical.” The first affects Internet Explorer 6 to 9 on Windows 7, XP, Vista, 2003 and 2008, and could allow attackers to take control of a user’s system. The […]

TGDaily: Sales of smartphones powered by Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 operating system have dropped 38 percent since the launch last year. According to comScore, Windows Phone 7 sales accounted for 8 percent of the smartphone market shortly after it’s debut, but now that figure has fallen to 5.8 percent. Despite the dismal showing, observers say […]

Business Insider: Ironfire Capital manager Eric Jackson says that smartphone manufacturer Research in Motion (RIM) will either be bought out or go out of business by the first quarter of 2013. “It’s a bad software company,” he said. “Bad cofounders, and they’re going to drive this company straight into the ground.” Jackson says the company’s […]

Cnet: According to market research firm IDC, Apple was the number one smartphone manufacturer during the second quarter of 2011, shipping 20.3 million iPhones and capturing 19.1 percent of the market. Those results mean Apple’s smartphone shipments grew 141.7 percent year-over-year. The number two smartphone manufacturer, Samsung, saw even bigger growth numbers — 380.6 percent. […]

PCMagazine: The Chinese government has responded to allegations that it is involved in a major cyber-spying operation by saying, “It is irresponsible to link China to Internet hackers.” While the original report from McAfee implied that a single nation was behind the attacks, rival security vendor Symantec says it doesn’t think so. “There has been […]

MSNBC: At the DefCon hacker convention, Carnegie Mellon University researcher Alessandro Acquisti demonstrated how he could use a mobile phone to take pictures of strangers and then use facial recognition software and Facebook to determine people’s names, friends and even their social security numbers. “If we were able to do it, anyone is able to […]

PCWorld: The U.S. Department of Justice is accusing notorious spammer Sanford Wallace of fraud for allegedly breaking into Facebook accounts through a phishing attack and then using those stolen credentials to post 27 million spam messages in 2008 and 2009. If convicted, Wallace could face 16 years in prison. While this is the first time […]

eWeek: Amazon has made three new announcements related to its Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud computing offerings. First, Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) is now available in all AWS service regions: the U.S. East and West Coasts, Europe, Singapore and Tokyo. Second, the company announced AWS Direct Connect, which gives customers the ability to connect […]

Computerworld: Recently, flash-based SSDs have been becoming more popular as an alternative to disk-based centralized storage arrays. Now, a new group of vendors is promoting flash-based products that use the solid state memory as cache and storage at the server level. STEC and OCZ Technology Group both introduced PCIe cards with flash components this week, […]