Amazon today announced Chime, a unified communications as a service (UCaaS) offering hosted in Amazon Web Service’s cloud. Amazon is entering a crowded market of UC solutions, some of which are already cloud-based and others that run on customer premises. Nevertheless, analysts who track Amazon say the company has an opportunity here. Chime uses a…
Toshiba is more than a laptop maker, but the vast Japanese conglomerate shrunk on Tuesday under a wave of bad news. In one day, the company lost its chairman, said it will stop building nuclear power plants, wrote off about US$6.2 billion relating to that business, and postponed its fourth-quarter earnings report for a month.…
Intel’s Itanium chip is hanging by a thread, and after more than three years, the company is now shipping the next and possibly final version of the processor, which is code-named Kittson. The chip is now shipping to test customers, and volume shipments will commence later this year, a company spokesman said. Itanium chips have…
Microsoft today took the unprecedented step of postponing an entire month’s slate of security updates for Windows and its other products just hours before the patches were to begin rolling out to customers. “We discovered a last-minute issue that could impact some customers and was not resolved in time for our planned updates today,” Microsoft…
Nothing says “I love you” more than the gift of digital books. Or at least, that’s what I tell my wife when I want a new e-reader. Anyone looking for a last-minute Valentine’s Day gift should take a look at Amazon today: The online retailer—as well as other retailers like Best Buy—are selling the Kindle…
Security researchers have discovered a macOS malware program that’s likely part of the arsenal used by the Russian cyberespionage group blamed for hacking into the U.S. Democratic National Committee last year. The group, which is known in the security industry under different names, including Fancy Bear, Pawn Storm, and APT28, has been operating for almost…
Google has turned a database service that it uses to run some of its mission-critical products into an offering for its public cloud customers. On Tuesday, the company launched Cloud Spanner, a new, fully managed database that’s supposed to provide the transactional consistency of a traditional database plus the scalability and performance of a NoSQL…
Microsoft is calling for a Digital Geneva Convention, as global tensions over digital attacks continue to rise. The tech giant wants to see civilian use of the internet protected as part of an international set of accords, Brad Smith, the company’s president and chief legal officer, said in a blog post. The manifesto, published alongside…
More and more browsers, such as Google Chrome, are implementing sandboxing to prevent any malware from escaping the browser. HP’s new Sure Click technology is something new, however: a hardware-based, isolated browsing session that will be a feature on upcoming PCs. HP Sure Click will first appear in the HP EliteBook x360 1030 G2. Other…
Seastar, an event-driven C++ framework for building applications for multiple processor cores, is adding the notion of concepts to make coding easier. With concepts, recently hailed by C++ founder Bjarne Stroustrup, specified interfaces are provided to templates without runtime overhead; design is simplified and the amount of boilerplate code is reduced. Concepts will be included in…