| tech master

الخميس، 10 أكتوبر 2013

$100,000 payday for discoverer of Microsoft Windows bug

With little more than a week ahead of the Windows 8.1 rollout, Microsoft said it dished out its biggest ever reward to a British researcher who found a chink in the armor of the new operating system.
James Forshaw uncovered a bug in a preview version of Windows 8.1 that hackers could exploit, according to The Guardian. The London resident is a security researcher by trade.

Microsoft paid Forshaw $100,000, the first time it has paid such a big reward.
Not bad for three and a half weeks of work.

Katie Moussouris, Microsoft senior security strategist, told the paper that Forshaw's discovery was particularly valuable because it learned a new technique of attack and its variants. Thanks to a newfound ability to defend against whole classes of attacks, Microsoft paid more than it would for an individual bug discovery, she said.

Microsoft has opened preorders for Windows 8.1, the update coming later in October 18, that's designed to make it easier for people to absorb the dramatically different interface that Windows 8 introduced.

Windows 8 fell flat with many customers by booting into a start page covered with high-contrast app rectangles rather than the familiar desktop with its start button. In 8.1, Microsoft reinstates the start button and gives users the option to boot their systems into the old-style desktop interface.

Apple's iPhone 6 will jump in screen size to almost 5 inches from the current 4 inches. At least, that's the claim from Cantor Fitzgerald analyst Brian White.

After meeting recently with an Apple supplier, White expressed confidence that a new big-screen iPhone will emerge next year, as reported by Boy Genius Report.

"Our meeting with a tech supply chain vendor highlighted a bigger iPhone is in the works, and our contact expects a launch in the 2Q:14/3Q:14 time frame," White said in an investors note released on Thursday.
"Nearly a year ago, our research in Asia uncovered early stage work on a larger iPhone, and we indicated in our Apple initiation report dated 9/4/13 that 'a larger screen size on the iPhone is possible in 2014 that could approach 5 inches.' Given today's meeting, we are confident that a larger iPhone (approximately five inches) will become a reality in 2014."

White's prediction follows a similar claim from Jefferies analyst Peter Misek that the iPhone 6 will sport a 4.8-inch screen. Misek's forecast followed a meeting between him and Apple suppliers in Asia.
DisplaySearch analyst David Hsieh also is eyeing a larger screen for next year's iPhone, specifically one that's 4.7 inches.

Other reports have suggested even bigger screen sizes for a future iPhone, anywhere from 5.7 inches to 6 inches.

Apple has lost a large chunk of market share to the Android world, which offers a huge array of big-screened smartphones. Some rival phones are growing in size to 5.5 inches and even 6 inches. But Apple is unlikely to go that large, so a size somewhat under 5 inches sounds feasible. Apple could also offer a couple of different sizes to hedge its bets.

In his report, White also chimed in with some interesting thoughts on an Apple smartwatch. The analyst's contact at the Apple supplier described an iWatch as "much more than an extension of your iPhone but as a multi-purpose gateway in allowing consumers to control their home (i.e., heating/cooling, lights, audio, video, etc.)."

White expects Apple to launch its iWatch before the end of 2014.

A Hewlett-Packard vice president had a lot to say about alternatives to Microsoft and Intel during a meeting of financial analysts Wednesday. And HP CEO Meg Whitman had some pretty provocative comments of her own.

The shift to non-Windows products at the world's largest PC maker is happening against a backdrop of a shrinking "Wintel" (Microsoft-Intel) PC market.

IDC reported this week that worldwide PC shipments in the third quarter of 2013 contracted 7.6 percent year-to-year.

"The market is changing more today than it has in the past 30 odd years I've been in the industry," Dion Weisler, executive vice president of printing and personal systems at HP, said at the company's Securities Analyst meeting in San Jose, Calif., on Wednesday. He continued:

In the past, if you had the Wintel playback and played by the Wintel playbook you could pretty much predict your results. You just needed to run a little faster than the other guy. Everything was pretty predictable...[But] we're in a new world now with multiple operating systems, new architectures, new silicon, new graphics, new subsystems.

Whitman had some tough words of her own for Microsoft and Intel.

HP's traditional highly-profitable markets face significant disruption. In personal systems...Wintel-based devices are being aggressively displaced by ARM-based PCs and mobile devices running competing operating systems...current, long-term HP partners, like Intel and Microsoft, are increasingly becoming outright competitors.

The push into non-Windows markets is being driven by places like China. "In China there are more tablets sold than [in] the United States. Guess what? Most of those are not on the Windows operating system," Weisler said.

HP is focused on four OSes now: Microsoft, Android, Chrome, and Ubuntu, he added.

"Chrome and Android represent $46 billion of opportunity and is growing at 12 percent," Weisler said.

As an example, Weisler brandished the new Chromebook 11 jointly developed with Google.

And it's not just Chrome and Android. He talked about a major a new contract in India for systems running on Ubuntu.

HP is not giving up on the PC market, of course. The market is still a $170 billion global market, he said. But it's declining.

"The traditional PC market declined faster than we thought it would," Weisler said.

He did cite opportunities, even in the shrinking Windows-Intel market. They include all-in-ones, workstations, and thin clients.

The Google Nexus 5 and Android 4.4 KitKat are less than a week away, according to new rumors. Word on the street is that the new phone and next Android update explode onto the scene together on October 15 -- next Tuesday.

That date comes from whispers around the campfire at Google Launchpad, a fortnight-long event run by the Big G for helping startups to develop their business.

At the event, developers have been served lashings of Key Lime Pie -- the planned name for the next update -- and Kit Kat bars -- which lent their name to the update at the last minute.