Datamation Staff

Fox News: Hackers hit online shoe retailer Zappos and got away with personal information for approximately 24 million customers. In a message sent to customers, the company said that while the attackers did not gain access to complete credit card numbers, they did steal shipping addresses, e-mail addresses, phone numbers, the last four digits of […]

Cnet: The U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC) has issued a preliminary ruling that Motorola’s Android-based devices do not infringe on Apple patents. The ruling must now be approved by the full commission. In a separate case, Motorola has alleged that Apple violates 18 of its patents. In recent months, Apple has sued numerous companies in […]

InformationWeek: After analyzing 419 publicly disclosed U.S. data breaches in 2011, the Identity Theft Resource Center (ITRC) determined that the most common cause of data loss was hack attacks, which were cited 26 percent of the time. Data lost in transit accounted for 18 percent of breaches, and insider theft accounted for 13 percent of […]

ZDNet: Dehli’s High Court is threatening to block Indian access to Google, Facebook, Yahoo and other large Internet services unless they begin censoring “offensive and objectionable” content. Specifically, the Indian court is concerned about “anti-social” and “anti-religious” content. It has given the 21 companies summoned for a case brought by journalist Vinay Rai until February […]

Bloomberg: The debut of the iPhone 4S in China turned ugly yesterday, leading Apple to temporarily halt sales at its stores in the country. At the flagship Beijing store, large crowds gathered overnight, despite temperatures that sank to 48 degrees. When the store failed to open within 15 minutes of the promised time, the crowd […]

Computerworld: IBM is reporting a major research breakthrough–the discovery of a way to store a bit of information with just 12 atoms. Until now, it required about one million atoms to store a bit of data. The researchers used antiferromagnetism, magnetism based on the spin of atoms, to create storage media that is about 100 […]

eWeek: Market research firm IDC is reporting that the market for solid state drives (SSDs) topped $5 billion in 2011–a 105 percent increase from the previous record of $2.4 billion in 2010. The analysts attribute the sales growth to a number of factors: a flood in Thailand which led to a shortage of spinning drives, […]

All Things D: Market research firm IDC reports that U.S. PC sales totaled just 71.3 million in 2011. That’s a 5 percent drop compared to 2010, and it’s the second worse year ever for the PC industry. HP, Dell, Acer and Toshiba all saw their U.S. shipments drop. Only Apple saw its overall shipments grow. […]

InformationWeek: The ongoing cyberbattle between hackers in Israel and Saudi Arabia is growing more heated. Last week, a hacker who claimed to be Saudi released sensitive financial data for about 14,000 customers of Israeli banks. Israel’s deputy foreign minister, Danny Ayalon, said his country would view cyberattacks as foreign terrorism and “no agency or hacker […]

TechCrunch: According to the latest research from comScore, Microsoft’s Bing search engine captured 15.1 percent of the search market in December, putting it ahead of Yahoo for the first time ever. Yahoo accounted for 14.5 percent of the market during the month, a decline from 15.1 percent in November. However, both Bing and Yahoo trail […]

Wall Street Journal: LG Electronics has agreed to pay Microsoft licensing fees on its smartphones, tablets and other devices that use the Android or Chrome operating systems. “We are pleased to have built upon our longstanding relationship with LG to reach a mutually beneficial agreement,” said Microsoft’s Horacio Gutierrez. Details about the deal were not […]

Bloomberg BusinessWeek: Approximately 150 workers at a Chinese Foxconn plant that manufactures parts for Microsoft’s Xbox threatened to commit suicide if their demands weren’t met. Foxconn officials said the dispute has since been resolved with most of the employees returning to work. The workers were upset about internal transfers at the company. “The reason you […]