Windows 10 adoption rises with Steam users: 25 percent have jumped to the new OS

    Windows 10 hit a milestone in the PC gaming world last month: The operating system is now installed on more than a quarter of all computers running Steam.

Valve’s monthly Steam hardware and software survey shows that 26.63 percent of users were running 64-bit Windows 10 in October. Another 1.01 percent were running “Windows 10,” which presumably refers to the 32-bit version, for a grand total of 27.64 percent. The survey was first spotted by WinBeta.

With these results, Windows 10 is putting more distance between itself and Windows 8/8.1, which combined account for 20.52 percent of Steam installations. Windows 7 remained the clear favorite, with a 44.42 percent share. As a whole, Windows still accounted for 95.39 percent of Steam installations, though it declined last month by 0.32 percent, almost entirely at the expense of Mac OS X.

The Windows 10 adoption rate among Steam users appears to be far ahead of that for the general population, at least according to some third-party metrics. For October, NetApplications recently estimated 7.94 percent share for Windows 10 devices that accessed the Internet, while StatCounter’s pageview-based metrics came up with 9 percent. In all cases, adoption is slowing. Among Steam users, Windows 10 installs increased by just three percentage points last month, compared to eight percentage points the month prior.

Adoption from PC gamers could get a boost in the months ahead, as more games launch with DirectX 12 support. The graphics technology promises to make PC games run much faster, but it runs only on Windows 10. Microsoft is also planning to get more aggressive with upgrades next year, reclassifying Windows 10 as a “Recommended” install so it downloads automatically on more machines.

The story behind the story: Microsoft has traditionally treated PC gaming as an afterthought, but that’s starting to change with Windows 10. Between DirectX 12, deeper ties to the Xbox One , and PC ports of some first-party games such as Halo Wars, Microsoft is hoping gamers will have lots of reasons to upgrade.

Dropbox woos large businesses with new Enterprise offering

  The new service adds features on top of the existing Dropbox   Business plan

            Large enterprises have a new Dropbox product tailored for them that the company unveiled at its user conference in San Francisco on Wednesday.

Dropbox Enterprise is built on the foundation of Dropbox Business, the company’s product aimed at organizations. Companies that buy it will get access to all of the features in Dropbox’s business-facing offering, plus special capabilities like the ability to prevent people with certain email address domains from using them with a Dropbox personal account.

When companies set up the service’s account capture feature, any employees with personal Dropbox accounts that are set up to use a company email address will have their syncing halted until they choose to either bring those accounts under the company umbrella or change the identity they use for the accounts to a personal email.

While administrators will get to see how many users have opted to keep their accounts personal, they won’t know which specific users opted out of joining the Dropbox Enterprise umbrella. That could prove problematic for systems administrators who want to make sure that those users haven’t exfiltrated company data using Dropbox.

Companies that buy Dropbox Enterprise will also get access to new insight tools that provide a graph of how members of an organization work together (and with outside organizations) as measured by the files that they share through Dropbox. Using those tools, administrators can evaluate whether people are working together the way they want them to, and also track sharing outside their organization to make sure nothing problematic is going on.

It’s similar to Microsoft’s Delve Organizational Analytics service for Office 365 users, which the tech giant has yet to make generally available to users of its collaboration suite. Microsoft’s service offers deeper insights into how people are working based on information it’s able to glean from the Office Graph API and also lets individual users see how their work habits compare to those of their co-workers.

Dropbox Business and Dropbox Enterprise customers will be able to sign contracts with the company to provide HIPAA-compliant storage for their files. That’s key for regulated healthcare businesses that need those storage controls in order to keep in line with laws governing the way they work.

In addition, IT administrators managing Dropbox Enterprise or Dropbox Business can now get access to beta versions of new security features including Suspended User State, which makes it possible to lock a user out of an account without having to delete the files in it. That’s a powerful tool for locking ex-employees (or soon to be ex-employees) away from sensitive customer data while still allowing access to it further on.

It will be interesting to see if the new offering drives additional interest in Dropbox’s offering from the large businesses that it’s targeted to. The company is competing against some heavy hitters in the tech industry, including Microsoft and Google. At the moment, there are more than 150,000 organizations using Dropbox Business at least in some small deployment, so that's a start. 

Gartner: Internet of things will change cyber security forever

  Analysts to explore cyber security trends during the    Gartner     Security & Risk Management Summit,    September 1-2, in Mumbai.

   Over 20 percent of enterprises will have digital security services devoted to protecting business initiatives using devices and services in the Internet of Things (IoT) by year end 2017, according to Gartner, Inc.

Gartner defines digital security as the risk-driven expansion and extension of current security risk practices that protect digital assets of all forms in the digital business and ensures that relationships among those assets can be trusted.

“The IoT now penetrates to the edge of the physical world and brings an important new ‘physical’ element to security concerns. This is especially true as billions of things begin transporting data,” said Ganesh Ramamoorthy, research vice president at Gartner.

“The IoT redefines security by expanding the scope of responsibility into new platforms, services and directions. Moving forward, enterprises should consider reshaping IT or cybersecurity strategies to incorporate known digital business goals and seek participation in digital business strategy and planning.”

In an IoT world, information is the "fuel" that is used to change the physical state of environments through devices that are not general-purpose computers but, instead, devices and services that are designed for specific purposes.

As such, the IoT is at a conspicuous inflection point for IT security, and the chief information security officer (CISO) will be on the front lines of its emerging and complex governance and management.

The IoT is redrawing the lines of IT responsibilities for the enterprise. IoT objects possess the ability to change the state of the environment around them, or even their own state (for example, by raising the temperature of a room automatically once a sensor has determined it is too cold, or by adjusting the flow of fluids to a patient in a hospital bed based on information about the patient's medical records).

“Governance, management and operations of security functions will need to be significant to accommodate expanded responsibilities, similar to the ways that bring your own device (BYOD), mobile and cloud computing delivery have required changes - but on a much larger scale and in greater breadth,” said Mr. Ramamoorthy.

Further said, “IT will learn much from its operational technology (OT) predecessors in handling this new environment.”

Although an IoT device may seem new and unique, a hybrid of old and new technology infrastructure enables the services that the device consumes to perform. Securing the IoT will force most enterprises to use old and new technologies from all eras to secure devices and services that are integrated via specific business use cases.

A unique characteristic of the IoT is the sheer number of possible combinations of device technologies and services that can be applied to those use cases. What constitutes an IoT object is still up for interpretation, so securing the IoT is a "moving target."

“Ultimately, the requirements for securing the IoT will be complex, forcing CISOs to use a blend of approaches from mobile and cloud architectures, combined with industrial control, automation and physical security,” Mr. Ramamoorthy said. “However CISOs will find that, even though there may be complexity that is introduced by the scale of the IoT use case, the core principles of data, application, network, systems and hardware security are still applicable.”

Encyrption ban banished from draft UK surveillance bill

A threatened ban on encryption has been banished from a draft bill on surveillance powers in the U.K. -- but the government plans to explicitly allow bulk surveillance of Internet traffic by security and intelligence agencies.

U.K. Home Secretary Theresa May began by listing the things the draft bill did not contain as she introduced it in Parliament on Wednesday.

"It will not include powers to force U.K. companies to capture and retain third-party Internet traffic from companies based overseas. It will not compel overseas communications service providers to meet our domestic data retention requirements for communications data. It will not ban encryption or do anything to undermine the security of people's data," she said.

But she does want police and the security and intelligence services to have the right to track Internet communications in the same way they do phone calls.

"It cannot be right that police could find an abducted child if the suspects were using mobile phones to conduct their crime, but if they were using social media or communications apps they would be out of reach," she said.

How police will be able to do that if companies such as Apple retain the right to offer end-to-end encrypted communications remains to be seen. The devil, as several Members of Parliament remarked in responses to May's statement, is in the details.

The new proposal is not a return to the draft communications data bill of 2012, May said. That was heavily criticized for containing the kinds of measures she ruled out Wednesday

, and ultimately blocked by the ruling Conservative Party's coalition partners at the time, the Liberal Democrats.

Draft bills are proposals for legislation that have not yet been debated in one of the two houses of Parliament.

Before those debates begin, May's text will first be examined by a joint committee of the two houses to get it into a form that will encounter less opposition than did its predecessor. The main opposition party, Labour, has already welcomed Wednesday's proposals -- in principle at least.

May intends to have the bill passed into law by Dec. 31, 2016, when previous legislation enabling government surveillance of communications expires.

The new draft frames the abilities of the police and security and intelligence services to acquire and retain communications data, to intercept the contents of communications, and to interfere with equipment so as to obtain data covertly from computers.

It also regulates the bulk use of these powers by the intelligence and security services, May said.

One measure likely to attract criticism is the requirement on ISPs to retain 12 months' worth of "Internet connection records" showing which communications services customers have used.

This is not a record of every web page visited, May said: "If someone has visited a social media website it will only show they have accessed that site, not the pages they visited or what they said. It is simply the modern equivalent of an itemized phone bill."

That comparison "was a bit crass," said Mike Weston, CEO of data science consultancy Profusion. "It's more useful and more intrusive. You can tell quite a lot more about what people are looking at online than you can from an itemized phone bill."

But May said there would be further restrictions on what could be stored: Law enforcement agencies will not be allowed to determine whether someone had visited a news website or a mental health website, only whether they had visited a social media website or a communications service, she said.

However, in certain cases the police will be allowed to determine whether someone has visited a particular IP address -- which will allow them in many cases to determine which website they visited.

In preparing the legislation, the government had consulted with ISPs in the U.K. and in the U.S., May said. Whether they are happy with the cost of capturing and storing all that traffic data for the government is unclear.

"There are suggestions that the cost to businesses could be £245 million over ten years," said Weston.

Boasting of the draft bill's provisions for transparency regarding the activities of the security and intelligence services, May said: "There remain some powers that successive governments have considered too sensitive to disclose for fear of revealing our capabilities to those who mean us harm."

But rather than proposing to finally lift the veil on those powers, she plans to give the agencies explicit permission to obtain data in bulk, putting an end to accusations that they conduct such operations illegally.

She proposed regrouping existing surveillance supervisory powers and handing them to a new Investigatory Powers Commissioner who will hold the intelligence agencies to account, and putting a "double lock" on the authorization of interception warrants by requiring approval from government ministers and from a panel of judicial commissioners.

One of the companies that already knows most about our browsing habits, Google, did not respond to a request for comment. Another, Facebook, said it is reviewing the bill and will follow its progress through Parliament

Newly-discovered Android malware impossible to remove

   Security researchers have come across a new kind of Android malware, which purports to be a well-known app but then exposes your phone to root attacks  and is virtually impossible to remove.

The new malware has been found in software available on third-party app stores. The apps in question use code from official software that you can download from Google Play like Facebook and Twitter, reports Ars Technica, so they initially seem innocuous and even provide the exact same functionality.

             But in fact they're injected with malicious code, which allows them to gain root access to the OS. In turn, a series of exploits are installed on the device as system applications, which makes them incredibly hard for most people to remove.

Mercifully, the three types of observed malware, known as Shedun, Shuanet, and ShiftyBug, don't seems to do much other than display ads at the moment. But their OS privileges mean that they could in theory be exploited to gain access to your private data.

The spread of the malware seems to have been automated: the team's already seen over 20,000 of the modified apps, notably in the US, Germany, Iran, Russia, India, Jamaica, Sudan, Brazil, Mexico, and Indonesia. There are currently no signs that the malware has made its way to the official Play Store. So, for now, it just pays to be careful if you go downloading apps from third-party stores.

Latest Windows 10 Insider build signals release of first update is imminent

Omits watermark identifying build 10586, just as it did last summer in run-up to launch

Microsoft today shipped a new Windows 10 build to its Insider testers, a refresh focused on bug fixes and improvements that contains a clue that signaled the first update for most users since July is imminent.

Thursday's build, labeled 10586, is the successor to version 10565, which Microsoft issued more than three weeks ago.

Build 10586 is a polish on last month's Insider update, and introduces no new features, hinting that it is among the last before Microsoft gives the code the green light for mass distribution.

"This build is really focused on bug fixes and general improvements," wrote Gabriel Aul, engineering general manager for Microsoft's OS group, in a post to a company blog today. "We've been loving this build in our internal rings as it is very fast and smooth, and makes a great daily driver."

While Aul's word choice pointed to build 10586 as the release candidate for Microsoft's first-ever update to Windows 10, a more significant cue was the omission of an on-screen watermark, which has appeared on earlier builds to mark not only the build number, but that it the code was for evaluation only.

Build 10586 has no such watermark.

Microsoft scrubbed the watermark from Windows 10 previews in the summer as it pushed towards launch. When it paused Insider build deliveries July 13 -- with Aul saying then that the company was "very close" to finalizing the OS -- it wiped off the watermark. Only after the July 29 launch, and the resumption of Insider builds to testers on Aug. 18, did the watermark return on preview program participants' PCs.

Rumors have circulated for the last week or more that Microsoft would issue Windows 10's first update, code named "Threshold 2," in the first few days of November. When that stretch came and went, the chatter shifted to pegging Nov. 10, which is also Microsoft's Patch Tuesday for the month.

Unlike with Windows 10's debut, Microsoft has not revealed a release date for the update ahead of time, nor said what nomenclature it will use to identify this update and others in the future.

In some places, Microsoft has tapped the initial Windows 10 build as "July 2015."

If build 10586 does become the release candidate for the update, it will be a milestone for Microsoft: The company has committed to generating multiple refreshes of the OS annually -- two to three times a year -- and this will be the first to automatically deploy to most consumers and many small businesses via the "Current Branch," one of three post-preview tracks the company will maintain for Windows 10.

Microsoft finally ties the knot with Red Hat for Linux on Azure

In a move many consider long overdue, Microsoft and Red Hat announced a new partnership through which Microsoft will offer Red Hat Enterprise Linux as the preferred choice for enterprise Linux workloads on Azure.

Azure will become a Red Hat Certified Cloud and Service Provider sometime in the next few weeks, making it possible at last for Red Hat Cloud Access subscribers to bring their own virtual machine images to run on Microsoft's cloud platform.

Microsoft has long offered Azure support for other Linux distributions, but Red Hat's key enterprise offering has been conspicuously absent.

"When I first heard the news, I wanted the title of the announcement to be, 'Hell has frozen over,'" quipped Gary Chen, a research manager with IDC. "I never thought it would really happen, but it finally did."

Through the new partnership, Azure customers will also be able to take advantage of Red Hat’s application platform, including the JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, JBoss Web Server and Gluster Storage along with OpenShift, its platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offering.

A "pay as you go" service called Red Hat On-Demand will offer RHEL images through the Azure Marketplace with support from Red Hat.

Developers will have access to .NET technologies across Red Hat offerings, including Red Hat OpenShift and Red Hat Enterprise Linux, with joint backing from Microsoft and Red Hat. RHEL will be the primary development and reference operating system for .NET Core on Linux, the companies said.

The companies will also offer unified workload management across hybrid cloud deployments. On the support front, meanwhile, a new enterprise-focused joint offering arriving in the next few weeks will be delivered by support personnel from each company co-located on-site.

The announcement has been a long time coming, said Elias Khnaser, a research director with Gartner.

"Microsoft should have done this 18 months ago," Khnaser said.

Still, the news is "a testament to Microsoft’s ability to rise above product competitiveness and be open, especially when it comes to Azure," he added. "Until now, clients that wanted to use Red Hat workloads on Azure needed to get a special support note from Red Hat, so this is definitely good news for clients that want to use Azure."

It will also benefit clients that use Microsoft Hyper-V but "may have avoided it in the past for Red Hat workloads," he said.

It's not a major game-changer for Azure in its battle with Amazon Web Services, Khnaser said, "but it is definitely a welcome step in the right direction."

AWS has long worked well with most of the major Linux vendors, but Microsoft "has a long history with Red Hat and Linux," IDC's Chen pointed out.

That history hasn't always been amicable. Not so very long ago, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer referred to Linux as a "cancer" in the technology world. 

The resulting lack of support for RHEL was negatively affecting Microsoft's cloud business, Chen said. "It was a big hole."

More recently, current Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has sung a very different tune.

Overall, the move underscores not just the competitiveness that currently dominates the cloud arena, Chen said, but also the recent transformation of Microsoft.

"If this doesn't show that this is a new Microsoft," Chen said, "I don't know what would."

Apple wages battle to keep App Store malware-free

  

Apple is facing growing challenges keeping suspicious mobile applications out of its App Store marketplace.

Over the last two months, researchers have found thousands of apps that could have potentially stolen data from iOS devices.

While the apps were not stealing data, security experts said it would have been trivial for attackers to configure them to do so. 

Apple has removed some of affected apps since it was alerted by security companies. But the problems threaten to taint the App Store's years-long reputation as being high quality and malware free. Apple officials didn't have an immediate comment.

"The common theme we are seeing is this new wave of attacks against iPhones and against iOS," said Peter Gilbert, a mobile software engineer with FireEye, in an interview.

That's worrying for enterprises tasked with keeping corporate data and passwords entered on employees' mobile devices out of the hands of hackers.

Apple reviews apps submitted by developers for its store. That process has somewhat rankled developers, who have complained the process is too slow.

The upside is that the App Store has not had the same problems with malware as Google in its Play Store for Android devices.

But hackers are now "really looking for ways to get vast numbers of apps in the App Store in these legitimate channels and getting past whatever the barriers that are put up there," he said.

Those efforts appear to largely centered in one place: China.

On Wednesday, FireEye said it discovered 2,800 apps in the U.S. and Chinese versions of the App Store that contained a potentially malicious code library used to deliver advertisements.

The ad library, mobiSage SDK, was developed by a Chinese company called adSage. The library had been incorporated into the apps by developers, who may have been unaware it had data-stealing capabilities. FireEye nicknamed the scheme iBackDoor.

Gilbert said the ad library was capable of loading JavaScript from a remote server. It would then be possible to take screenshots, capture audio or monitor a device's location. 

AdSage, based in Beijing, couldn't be immediately reached for comment. It has since released an updated version of the mobiSage SDK, which does not have the backdoor capability. 

Gilbert said it's possible that someone took AdSage's product, added the malicious capabilities and then made it available for developers.

The latest finding adds to other recent issues in the App Store. 

In mid-September, Palo Alto Networks found 39 apps that contained a modified version of Apple's Xco

de development tool. That version, which was dubbed XcodeGhost, could add hidden malicious code to apps it is running on.

A few days later, the mobile security company Appthority found 476 apps infected with XcodeGhost. Then FireEye said the problem was much worse: it uncovered 4,000 apps containing XcodeGhost.

The larger question is how the apps were able to bypass Apple's review.

David Richardson, an iOS expert with Lookout Mobile Security, said it's often hard to figure out at first glance the intent of an app.

Many of the capabilities built into XcodeGhost and the mobiSage SDK were not dissimilar to technologies used by ad networks or analytics platforms that Apple allows, he said.

But it was clear that the counterfeit version of Xcode didn't come from Apple, which was a big tipoff to malicious intent, Richardson said.

The mobiSage SDK case is more fuzzy: the ad library doesn't do anything outright malicious, which is possibly why Apple gave it a pass to the store, Richardson said. 

Still, FireEye labeled the apps using it as "high risk" in its blog post.

Claud Xiao, a security researcher with Palo Alto Networks, said how Apple reviews apps for security is largely a mystery.  

"Nobody knows how they do it," said Xiao, who did extensive research into XcodeGhost.

There are a couple of methods for reviewing code. Static analysis looks at individual lines of code, while dynamic analysis watches how an application behaves.

But malware writers have long used advanced techniques to obscure what they're doing in order to evade security scans and code reviews, Xiao said.

A cursory review of an app may not be able to detect if one was developed using the counterfeit version of Xcode or the legitimate version, he said.

The XcodeGhost and the mobiSage SDK problems show that Apple's code reviews are "not as perfect as we thought before," Xiao said.  

With A.I. advances, Facebook tests M, your newest assistant

       

Striving to keep up with the increasing demands of delivering users' News Feeds, Facebook is pressing hard to advance artificial intelligence.

Today the company reported that it's making headway in this area to create and test an artificial intelligence assistant dubbed "M."

Unlike other intelligent systems that might tell the user what the weather will be or to pull up a map, M is designed to complete multi-step tasks.

M, according to Facebook, is set up to purchase a gift, for example, and have it delivered to your mother. It also will be able to make travel arrangements and appointments and book restaurant reservations.

The new assistant program is in what Facebook calls a "small test" that is showing promise. However, to handle complicated requests and tasks, the system needs more advances in machine language, vision, prediction and planning.

"The amount of data we need to consider when we serve your News Feed has been growing by about 50% year over year -- and from what I can tell, our waking hours aren't keeping up with that growth rate," wrote Mike Schroepfer, chief technical officer at Facebook, in a blog post. "The best way I can think of to keep pace with this growth is to build intelligent systems that will help us sort through the deluge of content."

He added that with text, photos, video and soon virtual reality, Facebook is dealing with an every growing amount of information that users are posting and searching for.

Schroepfer noted that the Facebook A.I. Research team, also known as FAIR, has focused some of its research on image recognition and natural language understanding and is making gains that could one day benefit users searching for information on the social network.

Next month, Facebook's A.I. team will present its research on object detection, a subset of computer vision, at NIPS, an annual conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, being held in Montreal.

Object detection is a difficult challenge. While people can see stripes and shapes, the computer only recognizes pixels, making it more difficult to distinguish what is in the images.

"Our researchers have been working to train systems to recognize patterns in the pixels so they can be as good as or better than humans at distinguishing objects in a photo from one another -- known in the field as 'segmentation' -- and then identifying each object," Schroepfer wrote.

Facebook reported that its new A.I. system can detect images 30% faster, using 10 times less training data than previous industry benchmarks.

The company also said that it has combined its Memory Networks (MemNets) system, which is designed to read and answer questions about short texts, with new image recognition technology. By connecting the two, users should be able to ask the machine what is in the photos.

"We've scaled this system from being able to read and answer questions on tens of lines of text to being able to perform the same task on data sets exceeding 100,000 questions, an order of magnitude larger than previous benchmarks," Schroepfer wrote. "These advancements in computer vision and natural language understanding are exciting on their own, but where it gets really exciting is when you begin to combine them."

Though this research is still early on, Schroepfer said it could be a major development one day for people with visual impairments. With the A.I. technology, when their friends share photos on Facebook, the visually impaired will be able to find out what is in them.

Ezra Gottheil, an analyst with Technology Business Research, said Facebook is doing work that is important in advancing A.I. but also important to the social network.

"Facebook is in the content delivery business," he said. "It wants to give you more of what you want and less of what you don't want. That makes the user experience better. If you can find pictures, or particular pictures, with the objects you are looking for, with fewer mistakes, you are going to be happier. If you can speak your requests instead of typing them on those horrible smartphone keyboards, you will be happier."

Schroepfer added that Facebook's A.I. team also is working on teaching computers how to plan, as well as predictive learning, in which machines can learn through observation instead of direct instruction.

"Some of you may look at this and say, 'So what? A human could do all of those things,' " wrote Schroepfer. "And you're right, of course, but most of us don't have dedicated personal assistants. And that's the "superpower" offered by a service like M: We could give every one of the billions of people in the world their own digital assistants so they can focus less on day-to-day tasks and more on the things that really matter to them."

Mozilla keeps your browsing private with new Tracking Protection feature

           Firefox users who want to better hide their browsing habits have a new tool to use, thanks to Mozilla’s launch of Private Browsing with Tracking Protection in its latest browser release on Tuesday.

The new feature is an enhancement to Firefox’s Private Browsing mode, which deleted users’ browsing history and cookies after they closed a private window. Tracking Protection adds an extra layer of privacy to that by blocking code embedded in websites that tracks the way people behave around the Web. That means it will block a lot of ads, along with analytics tools and some social sharing buttons in order to help users keep their browsing habits more closely under wraps.

It solves one of the key problems with the private browsing modes that browsers like Firefox, Chrome and others have pushed in the past: while they may keep a user's browsing history under wraps for people looking at that person's computer, tracking features of websites will still be able to keep tabs on them.

The change isn’t good news for companies that rely on tracker-based advertising to make money, however. Although Firefox users are only a small (and shrinking) part of total browser users — and Private Browsing users a smaller percentage of that still — the new feature means that they won’t get money from ads that aren’t displayed to people using Tracking Protection.

That said, advertisements that don’t track users will still show up when users have Tracking Protection enabled, so that’s one way for publishers to continue monetizing their work.

It’s all part of a push Mozilla is making (through Firefox) to provide tools for users who want to curb tracking of their browsing habits, but the company says that it’s not out to kill advertising or ad-based businesses on the Web. Denelle Dixon-Thayer, the company’s Chief Legal and Business Officer, said in a recent blog post that the organization wants to push an open ecosystem that gives publishers and developers a way to monetize their work while balancing user privacy.

All of that is not to say that people who use tracking protection will be able to keep their browsing completely private. Internet service providers and network administrators will still be able to see what they do, for example.

Mozilla is also in a unique position to roll the new feature out. Both Microsoft and Google have advertising-based businesses that rely on tracking users in order to make money, so it’s not in their best interests to build similar features.

Were Apple to launch a similar feature in its Safari browser, it would likely provoke a swift, negative reaction from publishers that the company is trying to court to build apps for its platform and share content through iOS 9’s News app.

Features like this may drive renewed interest in Firefox at a time when the browser is losing market share to Google Chrome. Creating these sort of user-centric features will be key to differentiating Mozilla’s offering in a crowded and tough market, especially when the company’s competitors may not be as interested in building similar functionality.

Intel targets IoT with new Quark chips and free cloud OS

Intel has released new processors and software as part of its latest push to capitalize on the nascent Internet of Things market.

The products include new low-power Quark chips for IoT devices, and software and cloud services from Intel’s Wind River subsidiary, which aim to make it easier for companies to connect devices and upload the data they produce for analysis.

Intel is one of dozens of companies trying to capitalize on the potentially vast market for IoT products and services. Chip design company ARM, one of its biggest rivals, is expected to make its own IoT announcements at its annual conference next week.

The promise of IoT for businesses is that they can connect virtually anything in their organization -- from factory machine tools to office lights to goods in the supply chain -- to make their operations more efficient. But getting smarts into those end devices, connecting them to the cloud and making use of the data is complex. So Intel pulled together a set of technologies, including some from partners, to help companies get started.

Most of its senior executives were on hand to present the new products at an event in San Francisco Tuesday, a sign of how much importance Intel attaches to IoT.

                As an example of what IoT can do, CEO Brian Krzanich pointed to a proof of concept Intel did with Levi Strauss at a store in San Francisco. It put RFID tags in all Levi products in the store and fed the data collected back into the cloud. Store managers can now see exactly how much stock they have, and also locate items put back on the wrong shelves.

Krzanich wouldn’t say how much Levi might have saved, but he pointed to research saying that a 3% improvement in inventory accuracy usually translate into a 1% increase in sales, partly because stores are less likely to run out of stock.

Whether Intel can turn those pilot projects into a substantial business remains to be seen, but it hopes the new products and services will further its efforts.

It’s Wind River subsidiary released two open-source operating systems for developers building IoT devices. Rocket is a “tiny-footprint” OS that runs on 32-bit microcontrollers, while Pulsar Linux is a more capable OS that runs on 32-bit microcontrollers up to 64-bit CPUs.

Wind River also released a set of cloud services under the Helix brand, including a hosted application development environment, and a service for managing devices and their data. Intel also released development tools for building IoT applications, and an open source project called the Trusted Analytics Platform, is a suite of open source tools for analyzing data.

               The new chips include the Quark SE SoC (system on chip), due to ship in the first half of next year, and two microcontrollers, the D1000, which went on sale Tuesday, and the D2000, which will ship by the end of the year. The SOC has a pattern matching engine built into the chip. It means it can be programmed to detect certain environmental conditions and then send that data back for analysis when needed. So when a machine part vibrates at a certain frequency, for instance, it can send out an alert that it might need to be inspected.

                       

ഹലോ സുഹൃത്ത്കളെ 

Alphabet's Project Loon balloons to deliver Internet to Indonesia's islands

Alphabet aims to bring the Internet within the reach of some 100 million people in Indonesia through its Project Loon balloons flying 20 kilometers above the earth.

The company said Thursday that the country's top three mobile network operators—Indosat, Telkomsel, and XL Axiata—have agreed to test the balloon-powered LTE Internet connections over Indonesia next year.

Project Loon, started in June 2013,  aims to use a network of balloons floating on the edge of space to connect people in rural and remote areas. The project partners with local telecommunications companies to share cellular spectrum, and the balloons relay wireless traffic from mobile phones and other devices to the Internet using high-speed links, according to the website of the project. By moving with the wind, the balloons can be arranged to form one large communications network that helps telecommunications services providers extend their networks.

The use of balloons to fill coverage gaps where traditional broadband connectivity cannot reach is particularly relevant in Indonesia which is an archipelago of over 17,000 islands with jungles and mountains.

Project Loon can help overcome the difficulties of spreading equipment across the islands, providing connectivity to even the most remote islands, Mike Cassidy, vice president of Project Loon, wrote in a blog post. The tests represent an important step toward bringing all of Indonesia online, he added.

Only one out of three people in the Southeast Asian country are currently connected to the Internet, and over the next few years, Google hopes Loon can partner with local providers to put high-speed LTE Internet connections within reach of more than 100 million currently unconnected people, Cassidy wrote.

Project Loon is being run by an independent lab called X within Alphabet, Google's parent company, after a reorganization this month. The lab incubates new initiatives like Wing, a drone delivery project.

The balloon system has been trialed with Telstra in Australia, Telefonica in Latin America and with Vodafone in New Zealand. 

Bringing underserved populations on to the Internet has emerged as a goal for technology companies, particularly as these people could turn out to be potentially large markets for Internet services.

On Wednesday, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in Delhi that his company, which has about 130 million users in India, aims to connect the other 1 billion people in the country who don't have access to the Internet yet, to bring to them the opportunities of education, health information and other benefits that the Internet can bring.

Facebook's Free Basics service that offers free access to a few services through a local telecommunications operator has been criticized for creating a "walled garden" to promote a few services including Facebook. Zuckerberg said the "zero-rating" or toll-free provision of services was not opposed to net neutrality, which has been recognized in the U.S. and Europe. The Free Basics platform has also been thrown open to developers if they meet certain basic conditions, he added.

To boost Internet availability in remote locations, Facebook is  exploring the use of satellite to beam Internet services and recently bought satellite bandwidth to deliver free services to Africa.

IoT is here and mobile networks will never be the same

In 10 years you may be trying to watch cat videos in 4K, 8K or 16K resolution, but mobile networking will be as much a big-data problem as a bandwidth drag race. 

The systems that carriers brag about now for delivering games and streaming media to smartphones will have to be totally re-architected in the next few years to accommodate sensors, cameras and remote-control connections, according to Marcus Weldon, president of Bell Labs. 

The New Jersey-based research group is part of Alcatel-Lucent, which could become part of an even larger mobile equipment vendor next year if Nokia wins approval for a takeover bid. So Weldon, who is also Alcatel's CTO, has an interest in overhauling vast networks of cells and back-end systems. But Bell Labs has been ahead of the curve a few times in its more than half century of existence, inventing the laser, the transistor and Unix, among other things.

What's happening in mobile now is the start of a trend as big as the Industrial Revolution and the emergence of the Internet, according to Weldon. It's the instrumentation of everything: By 2025, we will be well on the way to measuring everything going on in the world and being able to remotely control most machines, he says.

The few sensors out there now, collecting digital security video or counting cars going over a wire on a highway, are just the beginning. "We've instrumented almost nothing in our physical world," Weldon said. Others call what's coming the Internet of Things.

Even simple devices can tell intriguing stories, like the Jawbone UP activity trackers that gauged an early-morning earthquake by showing whether users woke up. The concept can be extended to things like logistics, where cheap wireless devices on boxes could fill in the gaps in package tracking.

Today's wireless networks won't even be able to deal with the number of objects that will be sending signals in 10 years, let alone the amount of data they may be transmitting, Weldon said. Carriers will have to rebuild their systems for signaling, the procedural messages that networks and devices exchange just to make communication work. 

For example, a typical cellular base station on a tower is built to handle signaling for about 1,200 devices. That may be enough to serve all the mobile subscribers in an area, but after all these sensors and connected machines get installed over the next 10 years, that cell might have 300,000 devices to keep tabs on, Weldon said. 

Like other massive computing tasks, signaling is moving to the cloud. But because it involves real-time communication between base stations and nearby radios, it can't be done on giant regional data centers like the ones Google and Amazon operate, one or two to a country. If signals have to travel halfway across a continent, the tower's conversation with the device will time out and start over again. 

Instead, the computing needs to be virtualized and spread out among facilities closer to the cell tower. Things will get even more strict with 5G networks, where the industry consensus is to keep latency to 1 millisecond. That's necessary for things like remote video monitoring and control of equipment in near real time. So signals and traffic will probably be processed in various data centers about 10 kilometers and 100 kilometers away from a base station, Weldon said.

Cells themselves will get distributed, too. Smaller cells closer to users let carriers reuse the same frequencies many times over in the same area that one big tower serves now. The age of the small cell has been delayed since it was first predicted a few years ago, partly because the complicated work of mounting a base station has to be done many times over. But the proliferation of new connected devices will make it necessary, Weldon says. 

Small cells will do one more thing to improve networks: They're packed in close enough to use very high frequencies that only work at short ranges of 100 meters or less. Researchers at Alcatel-Lucent and other companies are studying these millimeter-wave frequencies and the U.S. Federal Communications Commission will debate a proposal for opening up some millimeter-wave bands for mobile service at a meeting next week. 

On Monday, Facebook announced that it was going to update and redesign the notifications tab on its mobile apps to make it way more useful. Mobile notifications will now surface personalized information such as your friends’ birthdays and other important life events, as well as information about upcoming events you’ve joined.

“We’ve heard feedback that people wanted to add important information that they can easily see, all in one place,” wrote product manager Keith Peiris on the official Facebook blog. “Along with your notifications, you can see and customize timely info.” This update to mobile notifications will start rolling out to U.S. users on both iOS and Android starting today, according to Facebook.