It is expected in the next couple of weeks, specifically at CES 2011 in January, that Microsoft will unveil a new version of its operating system compatible with ARM technology.
The software is thought to be designed with battery powered, mobile devices in mind, with Apple and Google’s recent advancements in the tablet and smart phone sector. Despite being the world’s largest software manufacturer, Microsoft certainly has lost ground to its competitors in the mobile computing market, with Apple’s iPad thought to have a 95% stranglehold on the tablet PC market and Microsoft’s only representative being the Windows 7 phone, which has received a mixed response.
Considering Microsoft’s well established relationship with Intel and the type of x86 chips which are favoured by the processing company it would be difficult to figure out why else would Microsoft would endeavour to establish a program attuned with ARM other than to attack the mobile computing market. With wireless technologies such as WiFi and mobile internet making data connection easier and more accessible industry commentators are predicting a significant rise in the use of mobile devices across the next few years and it is understandable that Microsoft, already at a disadvantage to its competitors, wants to make some kind of headway in this lucrative new market sector.
Windows current flagship OS, Windows 7, is known to be far too bulky to function on devices with limited capacity and processing power, this could mean an upgrade for Windows current Phone 7 platform (although unlikely) or the engineering of a ‘Windows Lite’ version that would operate with the systems most popular features.
So does this mean that the door is now closed for Intel and its biggest cash cow? Well, not necessarily; in the initial report from Bloomberg it is revealed that, “The new software also will be able to work on Intel Corp. and Advanced Micro Devices Inc. processors — the chips that power PC versions of Windows. While other versions of Microsoft software aimed at phones and mobile devices work on ARM chips, this is the first time it will make a full version of Windows available on that technology.”
If this statement is accurate, it will represent one of, if the not the first instance that a popular operating system has had the opportunity to run on both ARM and x86 architectures for
domestic consumers. What this also means is that there will be a chance to make direct apple to apple comparisons of devices that run on Windows and Intel versus those from competing manufacturers. Intel will have to get their skates on if they are to mount a serious challenge against the new range of ARM chips already set for launch in the new year with improved computing power and miserly consumption, if that is, ABI Research’s prediction that ARM will surpass x86 as soon as 2013.
Some of the world’s largest financial institutions and online commercial businesses, including Visa, Mastercard and Paypal where yesterday targeted by hackers or “hacktivists” operating in sympathy of the Wikileaks online whistle blowing organisation.
Wikileaks has been at the centre of a global media furore following the exposure of thousands of politically sensitive documents, the latest of which suggests that North Korean assisted missile compounds are being constructed in the remote Burmese Jungle.
The group who are called Anonymous set about implementing ‘Operation Payback’ using a host of zombie computers, internet capable systems which have been previously hacked or compromised, in a botnet DDoS attack on the specified corporations. Essentially these multiple inputs flood the bandwidth or resources of the intended targets, preventing their web pages from loading properly. The companies have been targeted for their refusal to process Wikileaks’ payments, resulting in disruptions to Visa’s processing and forcing the Mastercard website offline for several hours.
A spokeswoman for Mastercard said, following the site’s recovery that, “Our core processing capabilities have not been compromised and cardholder account data has not been placed at risk.” Despite reassurances, the success of the coordinated attacks may have some people questioning the safety and security protocols of these international corporations, especially considering that one of the perpetrators who yesterday admitted to being involved in Operation Payback and was consequently arrested, was a 16 year old boy from the Netherlands.
Twitter and Amazon are also said to be proposed targets of the activists, with the former yesterday in a seemingly anxious attempt to dissuade any retributive actions tweeting on its own page that “This week, people are wondering about Wikileaks, with some asking if Twitter has blocked @wikileaks, @cablegate or other related topics from appearing in the list of top trends,”
“The answer: absolutely not. In fact, some of these terms, including @wikileaks and @cablegate, have previously trended either worldwide or in specific locations”
This highly publicised event may have some businesses wondering about their own IT support and security and it seems that as highlighted in the past few days, anyone can be vulnerable to cyber attacks. Although small or medium size businesses are very unlikely to be the target of such an orchestrated manoeuvre my advice would still be to seek out solid, professional systems and advice to prevent any type system compromise.
In a recent post on Adobe’s official blog, Peleus Uhley revealed that 2010, the so called ‘Year of the sandbox’ still has a few surprises in store despite it being December. Adobe’s Flash Player already supports protected mode in both Windows Vista and 7 which assists users in conducting Flash Player and Internet Explorer in a low integrity process. This, Uhley admits, only serves a certain segment of Windows users, what about increased IT support for those who operate an alternate browser, for example Google Chrome? Well, here come Adobe and Google Chrome’s Carlos Pizano to the rescue.
A sandbox for those of you aren’t sure is a security mechanism that is used for separating programs, usually used to execute untested code or suspicious programs from third parties, suppliers and unfamiliar users. Essentially, it traps or at least hinders malware from escaping an application and wreaking havoc on an OS.
Apple which has been in a dispute with Adobe since 2007 regarding Flash on the iPhone, recently dropped the software from the newest MacBook Air and the intention seems to be to remove it from all future machines. Apple insiders cited security as the reason for turning their backs on the product and removing it from their Apple OS X system.
Google it seems took a different approach and instead sought to work in conjunction with Adobe to develop said sandbox. On the Chromium Blog, Chrome’s official news source, Pizano and developer Justin Schuh stated that, “This initial Flash Player sandbox is an important milestone in making Chrome even safer. In particular, users of Windows XP will see a major security benefit, as Chrome is currently the only browser on the XP platform that runs Flash Player in a sandbox.”
Although Google and Adobe are optimistic about their new development they do accept that there is still more to be done, “While we’ve laid a tremendous amount of groundwork in this initial sandbox, there’s still more work to be done. We’re working to improve protection against additional attack vectors, and will be using this initial effort to provide fully sandboxed implementations of the Flash Player on all platforms.”
Some users have already complained that the newly implemented sandbox has had a detrimental effect upon their software including breaking the control panel of the settings menu. No doubt Adobe will consider the long term security implications of the development a worthy compensation for these temporary inconveniences.
Microsoft has recently updated a test release of its new Internet Explorer 9 browser with a seventh platform preview, this time showing off developer related enhancements in features like Java Script. Microsoft say that the new release which is available to download from the Internet Explorer Test Drive site, is geared up to provide ‘real-world’ performance improvements to sites across the web. Ke features include a new user interface and support from HTML5 and CSS3
These real world improvements were revealed by Dean Hachamovitch, corporate Vice President for Internet Explorer, to be developments in Microsoft’s Java Script engine, Chakra. He stated that engineers have been tuning Chakra to corroborate more with the patterns found in real-world sites, observing attentively the way web sites actually use JavaScript in response to input from users, relocate objects and manipulate strings. What we might be asking though, is why weren’t these improvements, which sound more like commonsense than innovation, implemented much earlier.
Although Microsoft have again declined to announce even an approximate date of release for the new browser it is reported that there have been over 13 million downloads of IE 9 beta since it was released in mid-September.
What also transpired within the last few days was that Microsoft has already added stability fixes to the download. One update provides stability fixes and the second is said to address issues with the user feedback tool of Windows-Live-Essentials 11 on 64-bit machines.
Consumers have expressed particular appreciation for the new user interface in what have so far been largely developer based previews of the platform. Users with automatic updates can sit back and wait for the updates to be automatically installed. As for the short term future IE9, watch this space, insiders have stated that a launch could be set to coincide with the International Consumer Electronics Show in early January next year.
Is aggressive marketing and technological firepower enough to dethrone a market leader and alter the habits and inclinations of millions?
This is the problem that Microsoft have faced since the launch and promotion of its Bing search engine and while Bing has made some progress in clawing back a little of the market share from its competitors it is still a long way off become a real contender to Google’s crown.
At a recent panel discussion at the Web 2.0 summit in San Francisco senior Vice President of Microsoft’s Online Audience Business, Yusuf Medhi admitted that his company has, “a long ways to go in terms of what we want to accomplish.”
Google’s position as, essentially what is for many, a default search page has a significant effect upon the way people search the internet and Medhi admitted that it would be extremely challenging for Microsoft to turn the heads of users who utilize the service so frequently, a habit ingrained upon the social consciousness, even the term ‘to Google’ is now a verb recognised in the English Dictionary. Medhi stated that, “It’s a hard thing. Habits die hard,” but he and the rest of Microsoft will certainly hoping that they don’t die too hard as they look to increase Bing’s market share.
In September in the U.S, Google handled 66.1 percent of search queries as opposed to 16.7 for Yahoo and 11.2 for Bing. Microsoft’s search partnership with is being established globally to assert Bing as the back end search engine for yahoo sites.
Although these statistics may sound healthy for Google, the U.S market share is relatively competitive compared to UK data which shows that over 91 percent of all searches go through either google.co.uk or google.com.
Medhi stated that Bing’s offline and online marketing campaign has been geared towards highlighting the system’s capabilities to perform tasks or collect information within the framework of the Bing interface.
Google’s Nikesh Arora, President of Global Sales Operations and Business Development, sat a matter of feet away from Medhi at the same conference seemed to set Google’s targets squarely on developing the company’s capacity for display advertising. Not known traditionally as a significant display advertisement provider Google has been busy working on its technologies to simplify the process of devising display ad campaigns as well as buying up advertising space on thousands of sites.
This confrontation is only one part of the increasing war between Microsoft and Google which has recently seen Facebook brought into the fray. In alliance with Microsoft, Facebook’s impending message platform which, despite Mark Zuckerberg’s protestations, is set to challenge Gmail as one of the major online communication networks will also have Facebook Docs fully integrated into the system. Facebook docs represented the first ever opportunity for users to use a web browser to access Microsoft’s Office Web Apps. As what looks to be a direct challenge to Google Docs the tussle between these two titans looks set to go on for a long while to come.
Now users of Microsoft’s Windows Live Hotmail, who number well over 350 million are capable of enhancing the security of their entire Hotmail session with HTTPS data encryption, via SSL, a feature which is already used to help bolster the Hotmail sign-in process. This update coincides with a series of recent security based improvements to the Hotmail service, which included the purging of hijackers from legitimate accounts that had been compromised and legal action against domains frequented by hijackers. It is hoped that the increased IT support will not only help to prevent hijackers gaining access to Hotmail login details, but ensure that in such a case a more secure recovery path will be available for you to regain control of your account.
Also included in the initiative are Windows Live SkyDrive, Photos, Docs, and Devices pages which will all automatically be equipped to transfer their data via HTTPS. Microsoft is hopeful that this overhaul will give users more confidence that their accounts will be secure as popularity in rival email services, particularly Google’s Gmail continues to grow.
To activate HTTPS security for your Hotmail account go to your account live login and search for Manage SSL. Once this feature is enabled all of the connections you make in future will be delivered by SSL. The upgrade does not cover all connections though, including Outlook Hotmail Connector, Windows Live Mail and Windows Live app for Windows Mobile.
Once the changes have been in use for a reasonable period and proven stable Windows may decide to make HTTPS encryption a default setting for Hotmail Live accounts. The update has not been without its bugs though, with some customers complaining that they are having trouble accessing their mailbox
It was revealed recently, to no real surprise, that the popularity of Apple’s iPad tablet PC has sky rocketed since it’s launch in April of this year to take a 95 percent stranglehold over the tablet PC market.
Overall the market interest in tablet PCs seems to be undeniably on the increase, recent reports suggesting that shipments of tablet related products rose by 26 percent in the third quarter of this year compared to the previous quarter.
The main reason for the iPad’s dominance has to really come down to a lack of viable competition; like the company’s release of the iPod in late 2001, which today sees other industries bending over backwards to utilise the AAC audio format used by the devices, very few other products have become available to consumers as a rival to Apple’s multimedia tool.
Recently, Dutch company Ambiance technology launched their own 3G tablet, a move that hailed a congratulatory phone call from Microsoft bosses because the product, dubbed the AT Tablet, is the first 3G tablet PC to support Windows 7 Home premium software. With specifications that include 3G mobile broadband connectivity, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, ports for USB, card reader, mini-VGA and LAN, an impressive 160 GB hard drive and, unlike the iPad a camera, albeit only 1.3 mega pixels. The Dutch outfit believes that allowing customers to enjoy the same Windows software they use on their home computers with the freedom of the portable tablet should appeal more than having to get to grips Android based alternatives. Samsung’s own Galaxy tab , released recently with the Android 2.2 operating system has been widely received with average to good reviews.
Whether or not the AT or the Galaxy tab can topple Apple’s newest flagship product remains to be seen. More of a reason for the iPad to be looking over its shoulder is not however specific rivals in the market place but the sheer volume of Android based products that are to be unveiled in the near future. Although according to research currently Android systems share a lowly 2 percent of the tablet PC market, with new releases planned by the likes of Hewlett-Packard, ViewSonic and Research in Motion the selling ground for these portable devices could become considerably more competitive. With the overall sale of tablet PCs predicted to rise to over 54 million in 2011 and Christmas just around the corner it will be down to consumers themselves to speak with their hard earned cash, whether or not the iPad’s market dominance can be challenged.
Microsoft’s newest Office product, Office 365, is set to be more in the cloud than ever before. The next stage in their battle with Google has arrived, as they are set to launch their next generation cloud-based product in a very short space of time. Microsoft clearly dominates the office computing market; they still have a 94% market share, but clearly any encroachment from Google was unwelcome and Microsoft is seizing their opportunity to provide their services on a level with Google’s constant availability to everyone.
Rather than purchasing software and installing it to your computer, Microsoft will host the software and deliver services from its own servers. In short, you don’t have to worry about storage or hosting costs, simply your payment to Microsoft to keep your license running, which you’re probably already paying. It’s called Microsoft 365 to emphasize the fact that customers will be receiving attention from Microsoft every single day year-round with the cloud service.
While most larger businesses will still prefer to control their own day to day operations, 365 is aimed at the small to medium business which can’t necessarily afford the same complement of employees and hardware that the larger businesses can. Microsoft takes away much of the need to host your own servers and deal with your own maintenance, making it a good choice for the small business looking to appear professional but without an immense budget to match their aspirations.
As necessarily the case with cloud services, the software will be sold on a subscription based service. Their costs for business customers range from $2 to $20 US per user per month and may even include phone support depending on the package chosen by the business’s owner. This is quite a change for Microsoft, who normally only get paid during upgrade cycles, with some services requiring longer term costs. Now those who adopt the service will be paying Microsoft each month, potentially providing them a more regular source of income (not that Microsoft is necessarily suffering!).
The most exciting part of Microsoft’s cloud services is undoubtedly the fact that they will now be available on all different devices and accessible globally. Smartphones, tablets, and normal PCs and laptops will be able to access and possibly even edit such documents.
Office 365 is not available for purchase just yet; it’s in the beta stage in 13 different countries. It’s set to go on sale next year. The question is, will you be buying?
The internet, much as we make of it, is not a secure place. There are many spam sites looking to install malware on your computer. If you’ve ever had a look in your spam folder in your email, you’ll quickly realise that the large majority of your email is actually complete garbage on subjects you’d likely never be interested in. Protecting yourself when so much of the internet is set on robbing you of information and money can be a tricky job. Here are five steps to help you guarantee your safety on the internet and protect your computer from viruses and malware, without any help from IT support.
1. Install a antivirus program. This is the most important step you can possibly take. An antivirus program will immediately inform you of any threats to your system and can scan any incoming files for threats. Perfect innocuous sites can sometimes be hacked, so you won’t even know that there’s a virus on your system without this protection. Don’t let it lapse or expire – you’d miss your laptop if it all fell apart, wouldn’t you?
2. Put a firewall on your machine. This is basically protection from anyone who is hacking into your internet connection – if you’ve left your network unsecured, you can be vulnerable to many attacks. It’s important to remember that firewalls may block applications you want to use, so consider carefully what to let through and how vulnerable it might make you.
3. Watch out for fake websites. Emails that look completely innocuous, that may be from your local bank, may not be. Always remember to go to the website’s URL instead of clicking on links from your email. It only takes a minute and will leave you much more secure than you would have been otherwise; counterfeiters are amazingly good at making websites look precisely the same as they would have been.
4. Be careful on social networks. If a friend’s link looks completely out of character, don’t click on it. Their account may have been hacked and that means clicking on their link leaves you completely vulnerable to an unknown website, which may or may not be full of viruses and malware. At the very least, it’s likely that you may get an unwelcome post on your own wall, which will spread to all of your friends. If in doubt, just don’t click, or at least ask your friend about it first.
5. Don’t install any suspicious programs. If you’re browsing random websites and come across free software that seems too good to be true, it probably is. Do not download any of this, no matter how good it sounds; instead do your research and ensure you are downloading from a qualified site. If you do accidentally download a spam software program, then you’ll be pleased you have your firewall and virus protection, as they should shield you from any attacks and let you know that the program is suspicious. The internet is always changing, however, and viruses and malware develop apace; keep in mind that your defences are not foolproof and do your best to stop problems before they happen.
Though few in the tech world, especially if you’re in IT support in London, can understand why, many people out in the wider world still use Internet Explorer for their every day browsing. Whether you’re using it because it’s just what’s been installed on your computer and you never considered anything else or because you genuinely prefer it to the competition, here are a few tips and tricks to make your computing life a little bit easier.
1. Suggested sites. Are you enjoying the site you’re on? You can hit “suggested sites” to find out which sites are similar to the ones you’re already looking at. This does send information back to Microsoft about your browsing habits, though apparently without any information to connect it to you, but the suggestions are pretty accurate and can help expand your horizons. If you don’t have much time to browse the internet for yourself, suggested sites may well make your browsing a little more enjoyable.
2. Try out the accelerator. This is fairly unique to Internet Explorer; basically, if you highlight some text, a blue box will appear to next to it. If you click on the box, you’ll get a range of different options for what you can do with it. For example, if you’ve highlighted an address, you can look for it on maps or search for it for more details or to find out what it is. You can search for that text on Wikipedia, post it to twitter, or send it out through your email. The accelerator’s goal is to speed up your daily life by making tasks you’d normally perform a little bit easier and quicker.
3. Organise your tabs better with tab colouring. Internet Explorer 8 colours tabs to help you remember what purpose they have, even if they’ve become so tiny that you can’t read all the words. If you open a link in a new tab from a page, it will be the same colour as your original tab, so you can keep track of which sites are related. New tabs will be opened in different colours. It’s a small touch, but a good one to learn about and use to your advantage.
4. Take advantage of compatibility mode. If a site doesn’t function well in IE8, as many still don’t, the compatibility button will pop up and switch the browser down to an older mode, so you’ll still be able to use the page. Given how incompatible different versions of Internet Explorer are from one another, this can be a god send, and is well worth using while you’re waiting for the supposedly more compliant IE 9 to appear.
5. Finally, if you’re a developer, you are probably already aware of the fact that IE 8 offers a developer debugger to help you with your code. All developers know that Internet Explorer is notoriously hard to program for and can throw up errors for no particular reason. It can take hours to carefully modify your site to ensure it displays correct on all the different versions of Internet Explorer. This debugger doesn’t fix the problem (and it will never be fixed as long as Microsoft continues fragmenting their browsers) but it may ease the pain a little.
When Internet Explorer 9 is officially released, we’ll update with all new tips and tricks specifically for that version of this popular browser. Stay tuned!