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…
Two senators have written to the U.S. Department of Defense about reports that President Donald Trump may still be using an old unsecured Android phone, including to communicate through his Twitter account. “While it is important for the President to have the ability to communicate electronically, it is equally important that he does so in…
Twitter rolled back a new fix aimed to prevent abuse a few hours after it met with protests, reflecting that the company is still scrambling to find solutions to the problem of harassment on its service, but is willing to make changes quickly in response to its users. The social network on Monday rolled out…
Companies looking for a new video- and teleconferencing system have a fresh face to turn to in the market: Amazon Web Services. On Monday, the public cloud provider announced the launch of Amazon Chime, a new service that’s designed to compete with the likes of WebEx, Skype for Business and GoToMeeting. It’s a powerful swing…
A security researcher is showing that it’s not hard to hold industrial control systems for ransom. He’s experimented with a simulated water treatment system based on actual programmable logic controllers (PLCs) and documented how these can be hacked. David Formby, a PhD student at Georgia Institute of Technology, conducted his experiment to warn the industry…
Qualcomm will start shipping sample chips for the next generation of Wi-Fi by June, helping device and network vendors develop products that might quadruple users’ speeds and lengthen battery life. The new silicon uses an early version of IEEE 802.11ax, a specification designed to make wireless LANs more efficient and increase their performance as a…
Talk of a new version of Windows 10, dubbed “Cloud,” surfaced last week as eagle-eyed bloggers uncovered clues in a recent beta and preliminary code leaked to the Internet. It was unclear what purpose another edition would serve, but because it will apparently run only Universal Windows Platform (UWP) apps obtained from Microsoft’s store, many…