Datamation Staff

Bloomberg BusinessWeek: AT&T has sent some of its customers a notice that hackers tried to obtain their account information. “We recently detected an organized and systematic attempt to obtain information on a number of AT&T customer accounts, including yours,” AT&T wrote in an e-mail to customers. “We do not believe that the perpetrators of this […]

ZDNet: In its fourth quarter report, HP beat Wall Street expectations. The company earned $239 million, or 12 cents a share, on $32.1 billion in revenue. That’s not as good as last year’s $33.3 billion in revenue, but better than analysts had predicted. In her first earnings call as HP’s CEO, Meg Whitman signaled that […]

PCMag: New research from Facebook and the Università degli Studi di Milano reveals that most of the social network’s users are just 4.74 steps away from each other. If you take any two random Facebook users, you’ll be able to connect them in five degrees 99.6 percent of the time, and you’ll be able to […]

Associated Press: On Monday, Bill Gates took the stand as the first witness for the defense in an antitrust lawsuit brought by Novell. The Microsoft founder and former CEO said that his company dropped from Windows 95 technical features that would have supported Novell’s WordPerfect software because those features caused Windows to crash. He also […]

Washington Post: For Black Friday, Amazon is rolling out a whopper of a deal on smartphones. Customers can purchase most smartphones for just 1 cent (plus a two-year contract). The deal does not include Apple’s iPhone, but it does include some top-of-the-line Android phones like the Droid RAZR, Samsung Galaxy S II, the Droid 3 […]

WindowsITPro: Several independent studies have noted a striking rise in Android malware during the second half of 2011. The most recent, a third quarter report from security vendor McAfee, says Android malware increased 37 percent quarter over quarter. It adds, “In fact, this quarter Android was the sole target of mobile malware writers. A true […]

GigaOm: Analyst Charlie Wolf of Needham & Co. has issued a report saying that Mac’s enterprise PC sales climbed 43.8 percent in the third quarter. “What we initially viewed as a one-quarter blip in the business market has emerged as a durable pattern,” he wrote. Mac’s consumer sales grew too–up 24.6 percent. As a result, […]

All Things D: In a court filing, Oracle has lobbed some more charges at HP. Specifically, Oracle says HP and Intel plan to kill off the Itanium platform after “the next two generations of microprocessors.” In addition, Oracle accuses HP of paying Intel to keep Itanium going. “HP has secretly contracted with Intel to keep […]

Financial Times: In September, Facebook rolled out new tools for sharing music, videos and links that CEO Mark Zuckerberg said would “transform” media. Turns out, he was right, but probably not in the way he anticipated. Numerous news sites are reporting that decades-old stories with offbeat headlines are surging in popularity. For example, the UK’s […]

Reuters: In what could be the first known foreign cyberattack on U.S. critical infrastructure, Russian hackers shut down a pump in an Illinois water system earlier this month. According to a one-page report from the Illinois Statewide Terrorism and Intelligence Center, the hackers used stolen credentials to access the rural water system’s control software on […]

ZDNet: A new survey conducted for recruiter Jobvite finds that 48 percent of all U.S. job seekers, more than 22 million people, have used Facebook to help look for work. That’s a 53 percent increase since last year. In addition, 18.4 million people who are currently employed in the U.S. say that Facebook helped them […]

TGDaily: Google has revealed that the total number of Android smartphones activated has doubled in the last six months to reach 200 million. Daily activations top 550,000. Two years ago, users were activating 60,000 new Android phones a day, which seemed like a lot at the time. Android is now undeniably the leading smartphone platform […]