IT

Computer source code isn't a physical object under federal stolen property laws, according to a federal court of appeals that overturned the conviction of a former Goldman Sachs programmer. Sergey Aleynikov, the programmer, was wrongly convicted under the National Stolen Property Act and the Economi...

A new version of Google's personal computer operating system, Chrome OS, was released for developers Tuesday. It adds design elements of more conventional offerings like Windows and OS X. The new Aura interface includes a home screen with a task bar, or shelf, from which you can launch applications....

Research In Motion is planning to restrict consumers and app developers from sideloading Android apps onto its BlackBerry PlayBook tablet, according to Alec Saunders, company vice president of developer relations. "We're removing sideloading for consumers. Pretty sure we've got a solution for devs,"...

Research In Motion has released BlackBerry Mobile Fusion, extending its mobile device management platform to the Android and iOS operating systems through the company's Universal Device Service. Mobile Fusion lets IT manage BlackBerry smartphones up to the BlackBerry 7, as well as the BlackBerry Pla...

Google Gets Going With Go

Google has rolled out version 1 of its experimental open source Go computer programing language, 14 months after it first announced the language back in 2009. Go "is an attempt to combine the ease of programming of an interpreted, dynamically typed language with the efficiency and safety of a static...

The Mozilla Foundation on Wednesday released BrowserQuest, a massively multiplayer online game written in HTML5, JavaScript and other open source languages. "BrowserQuest is a showcase of how open Web technologies like HTML5, JavaScript, CSS and WebSockets can be used to create a multiplayer game th...

Research In Motion will soon give software developers prototype devices that run an early version of the BlackBerry 10 platform. RIM is hosting a BlackBerry 10 event in Orlando in May to coincide with its annual BlackBerry World user conference. There, a limited number of developers will have the c...

EXPERT ADVICE

Does Your IaaS Environment Have Sleeper Cells?

As many active users of IaaS can tell you, IaaS, whether implemented by an external service provider or provided by an internal service provider team, arguably grants you much more control of the underlying technology "substrate" than other cloud deployment models. In some cases, this is a good thin...

Solar flares -- clouds of charged particles and plasma from the sun -- have hit Earth, according to the National Weather Service. The solar flares have been making their way toward the planet since Sunday. The storms don't generally cause direct physical damage to people because the Earth's magnetic...

Apple's iOS handles HTML5-based games as much as three times better than Google's Android in HTML5, according to a new study from Spaceport. The report specifically measured how many images could be moved around the screen at a time while maintaining a rate of 30 frames per second. The researchers t...

Microsoft will release a beta of Visual Studio 11 on Feb. 29, the same day it releases a preview version of its Windows 8 operating system. VS 11 is an integrated development environment spanning the entire software creation lifecycle from architecture to code deployment, testing and validation. It ...

EXPERT ADVICE

When in the Cloud, Trust - but Verify

Quite a lot has been written about the importance of due-diligence in a cloud environment. Sometimes the importance of security and compliance-related vetting in the cloud is easy to justify, like when you're evaluating an off-premises public cloud hosted at a new service provider. Other times, exe...

Google is tracking users of the Internet Explorer Web browser without their knowledge, Microsoft has asserted. After news emerged last week that Google had bypassed the privacy settings of Apple's Safari browser, Microsoft researchers began looking into whether the search giant was also playing fast...

The U.S. Department of Transportation has proposed guidelines that advise automakers to disable certain in-vehicle electronic features. The DOT wants to crack down on any action that requires drivers to give the task more than a two-second single glance, or 20 seconds of total glance time, to contro...

Last week, Cisco raised an objection to the Microsoft acquisition of Skype, saying it would hurt video conferencing interoperability -- even though, in this space, you could argue Cisco is not the poster child for interoperability. Coincidently, I met with the CEO of LifeSize, and he saw this Micro...

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