Software giant Microsoft has sold 60 million licences and upgrades for its new Windows 8 operating system in the 10 weeks since its launch. Tami Reller, chief financial officer of the Windows division, said at the Consumer Electronics Show that Windows 8 sales are growing in line with those of Windows 7, Microsoft’s last operating system, launched in 2009. According to the Sydney Morning...
Inside a small bungalow on the street separating Kansas City, Kan., from its sister city in Missouri, a small group of entrepreneurs are working on their ideas for the next high-tech startup, tapping Google Inc.'s new superfast Internet connection that has turned the neighborhood into an unlikely settlement dubbed the "Silicon Prairie." The home on State Line Road is one of several startup-friendly locations...
A previously unknown and currently unpatched security hole in the latest version of the Java software framework is under attack online, according to security researchers and bloggers. Attack code that exploits vulnerability in Java's browser plugin has been added to the Blackhole, Cool, Nuclear Pack, and Redkit exploit kits, according to the Malware Don't Need Coffee blog, prompting its author to say that the...
Microsoft said it will patch at least 14 vulnerabilities next week, including four in Internet Explorer (IE), making it three months in a row that the company has plugged holes in its browser. Of the nine updates set for Aug. 14, five will be labeled "critical," the most serious of the four ratings Microsoft uses. The other four will be pegged "important," the next-lower...
Microsoft may have nixed its "Metro" branding for the new tile-based design in Windows 8 and Windows Phone, but the company appears to be split over its replacement naming. Earlier this week it was reported that references to "Metro-style applications" would become "Windows 8 applications," and that the "Metro user interface" would be switched to "Windows 8 user interface." However, Microsoft employees have started...
Facebook has been accused of deceiving developers after it emerged that the social networking site did nothing to verify the security of applications it was paid tens of thousands of dollars to review, and which it assured users had been checked. It is believed Facebook was paid up to $95,000 (£60,600) by developers whose applications were entered into its verified apps scheme. The system...
Google has announced that it will soon penalize sites that are repeatedly accused of copyright infringement. But one site in particular doesn’t need to worry: Google’s own YouTube. It has a unique immunity against the forthcoming penalty. The penalty – which SearchEngineLand dubbed the Emanuel Update – impacts Google’s web search results. If someone has reported a web search listing as being a copyright...
Microsoft isn't exactly known for its underground hacker culture, but a recent effort to give its employees more slack is generating some wild experiments. In 2009, Microsoft came up with a concept called "The Garage." It's essentially Microsoft's answer to Google's famous "20% time" — the longstanding Google initiative that lets its employees work on projects unrelated to their primary jobs in their spare...
Twitter has done a bit of work to improve the overall performance of their site. So you shouldn't see much more of their "fail whale". Their upgrade moves rendering back to the Twitter servers which has allowed them to drop page load times to 1/5th of what they previously were. The Twitter blog goes into further technical details on how they intend to speed...
Here's a deal that would have made many minds explode back in the 1990s: Microsoft is buying Netscape. Or at least, most of the important parts of the company that used to be synonymous with "Internet". That's a side component of the $1 billion patent sale that AOL and Microsoft announced this morning. As part of the transaction, AOL announced that it was selling...
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