Google has decided to stop its Street View cars from sniffing wireless networking data after an embarrassing privacy gaffe.
The company revealed Friday that Street View vehicles had been sniffing the content of users’ Internet communications on open wireless networks, despite the company’s earlier statements to the contrary.
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A former security guard has pleaded guilty to charges that he broke into his employer’s computers while working the night shift at a Dallas hospital.
Jesse William McGraw pleaded guilty Friday to two counts of transmitting malicious code, the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) said in a statement.
Dell will release its Streak handheld computer in Europe next month and in the U.S. during the summer, CEO Michael Dell said on Thursday.
The Streak is an Android-based device that Dell showed at the Consumer Electronics Show in January. Not to be confused with Dell’s Mini 3 smartphone that is on sale in a few emerging markets, the Streak has a larger, 5-inch touch screen and looks like an iPhone but bigger.
Facebook took the wraps off Thursday on two new security features aimed at protecting users from phishers and other online scammers.
“At Facebook, we’re constantly working on new ways to protect you from scams and help you keep your account and information secure,” wrote Lev Popov , a Facebook software engineer, in a blog post late on Thursday afternoon.
“Today, we’re announcing some new tools and systems designed to keep the bad guys out and keep you abreast of suspicious activity so you can quickly take action to correct it,” Popov wrote.
Intel on Tuesday showed off a netbook with a dual-core Atom processor as it talked up efforts to crank up the performance of the low-cost laptops.
The dual-core netbook shown on stage at the company’s investor meeting in Santa Clara, California, was thinner than a thumb. The company also showed off a tablet computing device based on a new Atom chip during the event, which was also webcast.
Now that it looks like Google and Verizon are teaming up to create their own tablet, the question becomes, “How does Google avoid another Nexus One-style debacle?”
The mere fact that Google is reportedly working closely with Verizon on developing the tablet shows that the company is already ahead of where it was with the Nexus One smartphone, which the company tried to spring on the market without an exclusive carrier.
Also read: Top wireless stories of 2010
Although it initially looked as though all four major U.S. wireless carriers would carry the device on their networks, both Sprint and Verizon recently balked and said they would offer alternative Android-based devices on their networks instead.
Start-up Infineta Systems is coming out of stealth mode just in time to reveal that it is working on one of the knotty problems raised this week at the EMC World conference – how to connect data centers efficiently for backup, replication and cloud services that rely on live migration of virtual machines.
Infineta is coming out with hardware that supports its Velocity Dedupe Engine, which will initially support 10Gbps connections between data centers, says Raj Kanaya, the company’s CEO. Its deduplication and TCP optimization efforts reduce traffic that actually travels on the WAN links between data centers to 20% of what it would be without running through the box, he says.
