TechBlog

A university professor in Sweden has “hope for humanity” after the thief who stole his laptop backed up all his data and mailed it to him on a USB stick. Having your laptop stolen sucks, but what really hurts is the loss of everything on it. Whether it’s family vacation photos or the sum total of your life’s work, that’s stuff that you just can’t get back unless you’re seriously conscientious about making backups. And come on, who does that? So when a Swedish professor discovered that somebody had swiped his laptop, he was understandably crushed. ...

Peter Kafka at All Things Digital thinks that Steve Jobs might want to buy Facebook. His reasoning is that Jobs, when asked what Apple plans to do with its now $51 billion in cash, said, “We firmly believe that one or more unique strategic opportunities will present itself to us, and we’ll be in a position to take advantage of it.” Kafka believes that one such “unique strategic” opportunity is called Facebook. ...

If the internet is feeling a little more crowded these days, there’s good reason. According to a report out Tuesday, there will be 2 billion Web dwellers by the end of this year. The number of internet users worldwide has doubled in the past five years according to the report, from the International Telecommunication Union. Much of the big number can be attributed to internet growth in developing countries. The report said 162 million of the 226 million new Internet users in 2010 will live in those countries, where Web access is still growing. ...

Microsoft has ramped up its battle with Google in wooing business customers with its next generation cloud-based product. While the software giant dominates the office space with a 94% market share it has been facing increased competition from Google. At a San Francisco event, Microsoft unveiled Office 365. The product brings together Microsoft Office, SharePoint Online, Exchange Online and Lync Online. This means instead of paying for packaged software and installing it on a PC or corporate server, Microsoft will host and deliver the software from its own giant data centers. ...

Personal information scanned into certain digital photocopier hard drives can be easily tapped, according to a CBC News investigation probing the second-life of older machines that are re-sold or leased. CBC purchased a used Canon Image Runner Color 3200 from a UPS franchise on Kijiji, an online classifieds website. The copier’s two hard drives were removed and plugged into a laptop, which revealed the units had not been wiped clean before being sold and shipped. ...

Today Doritos Late Night presented the first 360 degree musicvideo on youtube. It’s the musicvideo of Professor Green with his latest hit: “Coming to get me”. Go and check it out!!!!

Apple’s CEO says that Android is fragmented and that the open vs. closed dilemma is not important as long as Apple’s proprietary mobile operating system manages to provide a better user experience. “Many Android OEMs install proprietary user-interfaces to differentiate themselves from the commodity Android experience. The user is left to figure it all out. Compare this with iPhone where ever handset works the same. (…) We think the open vs closed is just a smokescreen to try and hide the real issue, which is: What’s best for the customer? Fragmented vs. integrated. We think Android is very very fragmented and becoming more fragmented by the day.” ...

Maybe your main problem with tattoos is probably the fact that you’ve never been able to play Pong on them. But those problems seem to be over now that an international team of researchers, led by John Rogers at the University of Illinois, has developed a new flexible array of LEDs that can be implanted under the skin. The researchers managed to make the LED matrix implantable by encasing the electronics in a thin layer of silicon rubber that makes the whole thing functional even when exposed to biofluids. Mc10, a new company founded by Rogers, hopes to commercialize the new technology over the next few years. ...

In late January, the Number Resource Organization (NRO) warned that IPv4 addresses were drying up, with less than 10% unallocated — a figure that has shrunk rapidly over the last nine months. The organization now reports that two more blocks of IPv4 addresses have been assigned, putting the number of vacant addresses below 5%. “This is a major milestone in the life of the Internet, and means that allocation of the last blocks of IPv4 to the RIRs is imminent,” said NRO chairman Axel Pawlik. He continued by urging all Internet stakeholders to take action now by adopting IPv6, the “next generation” of the Internet Protocol, which offers infinitely more address space. IPv4 (32-bit) gives up to 4.3 billion addresses, whereas IPv6 (128-bit) provides 340 undecillion addresses (340 billion billion billion billion — that’s 36 zeros). ...

There has been an “unprecedented wave” of exploits against vulnerabilities in Oracle’s Java during the third quarter of this year, according to data from the Microsoft Malware Protection Center. The software giant provided the following data to back its claims, outlining three specific vulnerabilities (all of which have patches available) that are being exploited en masse: CVE Attacks Computers Description 2008-5353 3,560,669 1,196,480 A deserialization issue in vulnerable versions of JRE (Java Runtime Environment) allows remote code execution through Java-enabled browsers on multiple platforms, such as Microsoft Windows, Linux, and Apple Mac OS X. 2009-3867 2,638,311 1,119,191 Another remote code execution, multi-platform issue caused by improper parsing of long file:// URL arguments. 2010-0094 213,502 173,123 Another deserialization issue, very similar to CVE-2008-5353. As you can see, the first two are particularly worrying: they’ve gone from hundreds of thousands per quarter to millions. The third one is the newest, so it’s possible that it will also do the same. ...